Once you have selected the employees that will be working for your company, the next important step is performance appraisal. It is one of the most effective instruments the employer has. It can help to develop the employees' performance.
The strengths of the performance appraisal are its ability to promote a two-way communication between the supervisor and the person being appraised and to help the employee to take more responsibility for improving his/her performance. In contrast, in the old fashioned traditional performance appraisal, the supervisor acts more as a judge of employee performance than as a coach. By doing so, unfortunately, the focus is on blame rather than on helping the employee assume responsibility for improvement.
In today's fast-paced business world, it may seem like a luxury for organizations to spend precious resources for planning, developing and engaging in employee performance appraisals. The truth is, however, that most organizations can't afford not to give performance evaluations. There are three key reasons why every organization should give performance reviews.
The first reason is that performance appraisals help employees become better workers. All good managers provide regular feedback to employees so that they can develop into skilled workers that will be useful to the organization. A written performance evaluation is a way of formalizing this feedback and allows employees know that their performance counts in order to develop. A performance review also allows employees to take a step back from what they are doing, to focus on how well they are doing it. From this point, they can make action plans to improve or alter behaviour and set new personal goals. Encouraging people to work to their full potential is the ultimate goal of a performance evaluation.
Then we come to a point where Performance appraisals can help determine employee compensation. As the performance based compensation grows in importance, so does the need for an objective performance evaluation. The best evaluation forms serve this purpose and bring clarity to the manner in which employees are compensated. From sales people, who are paid by their ability to follow the plan of sales, to simple workers whose goals are less tangible, performance appraisals serve to place objectives and then measure the degree to which these objectives are achieved.
The third reason is that Performance appraisals can protect organizations. In today's fast changing society, having formal documentation of an employee's performance is an important protection device. Detailed record of poor performance and lost goals can be an effective counter to claims of bias in the case of a dismissed worker and are often held up by the courts as legitimate justification for termination. This can protect industries and companies but on the other hand positive appraisals can help the employee to climb the hierarchy or help him/her to another potential job.
The performance appraisal process is not an easy thing to do and it can lead to uncomfortable situations. People might misinterpret appraisals for the wrong reasons and wrong perspective, which ends up putting the manager and the employee on different sides. Appraisals are usually used for determining pay increases, who gets fired or who gets promoted. Often they are used to focus on what people have done wrong and that's why people are negatively opposed to them. Sometimes if not always we loose the main purpose of appraisal which is not all the above but something more general. The most important purpose or goal of the appraisal is to improve performance in the future. Managers can get valuable information from employees to help them make employee's jobs more productive. Work units and organizations can identify problems that interfere with everyone's work.
In conclusion, we do use appraisals for a number of reasons but if we are going to get real value out of the time and energy we put into them, we have to look at the process in a more constructive way. And at the end that's making performance better.
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