Employee Appraisal

You and Work

by BizHelp24
19/10/2005

Introduction

If you want to keep your business pushing forward, it is important that you perform regular evaluations on the performance of your greatest asset - your employees. Arguably, this is more important when you have a number of employees (say, more than 10) that you can't supervise at the same time and therefore you are never fully aware of the tasks they are doing.

In such case, although many employers don't enjoy the work and time involved, an appraisal system should be introduced to determine the performance and value of all employees in your business.

By doing so, it will not only benefit your business, but also the employees which will be detailed further in the following article.

What Does an Appraisal Involve?

An appraisal is commonly a formal meeting between you (or the supervisor responsible) and the employee where a performance evaluation can be made with the comments and opinions of both.

The complexity and depth that you go into will relate to what you are trying to achieve from the appraisal. This will be outlined further in the next section.

The evaluation is recorded and a copy is kept by yourself and the employee who will use it as feed-back to act on anything that has been suggested or commented on. The evaluation that has been recorded will further be used in the next formal appraisal to determine the level of improvement by the employee during that period.

Although you may feel you have completed the evaluation by holding a meeting with employees, appraisal can be seen as an on-going process. It is your responsibility (if you are the supervisor) to ensure that employees are acting on the feed-back given and that they understand what they have to do. This doesn’t necessarily mean another meeting, just a regular check to see if everything is ok.

The appraisal may be assigned by the manager/employer but is usually carried out by the employees’ immediate supervisor (if not the same person). Doing it this way is more effective as the supervisors will have a better knowledge of the employees and therefore will be able to evaluate performance with more accuracy.

Reasons for an Appraisal

There are many reasons why you may deicide that an appraisal is appropriate and below is a common list for using one:

To identify any training that may be needed

To make personal/business objectives clear

To identify employees that are potential for promotion

To review salaries or payment methods

To identify individual strengths of employees

To increase motivation

To develop relations between the employee and the supervisor

To improve performance

To update job descriptions

The main benefits for using an appraisal system are as follows:

Gives you an idea of what you should expect from your employees

Develops further yourself as a manager (or superior)

Employees are given feed-back that can be acted upon to increase their productivity and ability by eliminating their weaknesses and identifying strengths

The supervisors develop a better relationship with the employees by getting to know them better and what their job consists of more precisely

Improves communication in the business

When Should You Do an Appraisal?

Appraisals have no set structure when time is involved and are usually done when the business believes it is necessary. Ideally, appraisal should be something that goes on all year but there are only so many times when you can formally evaluate your employees.

Although different people will have different opinions on when an appraisal evaluation should be issued, the first is suggested after six months of the initial employment of the employee. After this, the next appraisal is suggested six months later and then extended to following yearly periods. It is therefore saying that all employees will have different times for appraisal evaluations but you may designate a specific time of the year where you will evaluate all employees at the same time.

How Do You Evaluate Performance?

So far, we have used the term ‘performance’. You may already have your own ideas of evaluating performance but below are ways that you can split it up and determine the level of standard for each employee:

Meeting Deadlines projects, paper work, returning phone calls, attending meetings, etc

Numeric no. of sales, production rate (e.g. invoices sent per day), etc

Procedural responding to complaints, giving out information, etc

Financial profit made, working to budgets, etc

Negative personal complaints, no. of defects (e.g. per day), comments made by other staff and customers, etc

Recognizable relations with customers, presentations, comments made by other staff and customers, etc

Article Index

1 Introduction
2 Appraisal Evaluation

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Comments

Donna Price 07/12/2009 6:00 pm

Performance appraisals are such a great opportunity for managers or business owners to a “coaching” relationship with their employees. By evaluating the past year honestly and openly, managers can work with employees to set goals. The real key is to meet regularly with employees to score and evaluate each goal. This is where so many fail. The once a year meeting just doesn’t work. An ongoing coaching relationship can increase results and improve the workplace in so many ways!

Donna Price