Performance appraisal is a valuable tool for the management of a company. Due to it, a manager can track, maintain and develop the work performance of an employee over a period of time.
By definition, performance appraisal has three basic functions:
- to provide adequate feedback to each person on his or her performance;
- to serve as a basis for modifying or changing behavior toward more effective working habits;
- to provide data to managers with which they may judge future job assignments and compensation.
Over the years, employee performance appraisal systems have evolved and continuously adapted to the challenges faced by companies. Currently, there is a need for more frequent and reduced dimensions evaluations where the manager's focus is on providing immediate and continuous feedback to the employee.
The rapid change and evolution of market trends no longer allows for only an annual evaluation, so it is more effective for a manager to maintain a more frequent contact with the employees.
Presently, companies are creating dynamic and short-term projects, which again does not fit with the classic evaluation model. The current trend is to increase the frequency flow of "manager-employee" meetings (“touchpoints”) with the purpose of prioritization, and it is preferable that the meetings start from 2 basic questions:
- What am I doing that I should keep doing?
- What am I doing that I should change?
Moreover, nowadays companies often prefer teamwork over individual projects. Based on this, the classic appraisal is not suitable for improving team performance nor for clearly tracking collaborations within teams. For example, some retail companies choose to still give workers end-of-year assessments, but only to summarize performance discussions that happen throughout the year and to set pay increases accordingly.
A useful method for measuring teamwork can be the 360-degree feedback. This type of assessment provides each employee the opportunity to collect feedback from several sources (manager; from 4 to 8 peers; coworkers or even customers). The main purpose of this method is to give the employee a much broader and objective perspective on how he is perceived by his work colleagues. At the same time, the manager receives a much more detailed analysis of the employee's behavior and can create new opportunities for him based on it.
Furthermore, theoretically the manager has all the perspectives he needs...but what is the employee's perspective on his own performance?
To find out how an employee rates his productivity, there is the "self-evaluation" method.
First of all, self-evaluation gives the employee the confidence and freedom to communicate openly about his work, which helps to develop the manager-employee relationship. Secondly, based on the self-assessment, new difficulties that the employee encounters, but which may go unnoticed by the manager, can be identified. Last but not least, self-evaluation gives the employee the opportunity to feel that he belongs to the company he works for and that he can actively contribute to increasing its productivity.
However, the way in which performance evaluations have evolved and changed over the years, brings a new challenge...how can managers propose more frequent evaluations and meetings with employees without the support of the usual appraisal process?
The answer is actually quite simple...companies are becoming more open to mix between formal and informal meetings. Thanks to that, continuous feedback becomes a principle of the organizational culture and through it opens the way to an organic and genuine manager-employee relationship. For example, companies as Adobe or Deloitte have reported significant improvements in employees` job satisfaction afterapproaching the continuous feedback
Oraroo combines the classic way of formal evaluation with the current methods of collecting permanent and multi-directional feedback.
For more details or a demo: contact@oraroo.eu