It’s coming to that time of year again – performance appraisals! Do you know anyone who likes them? When I first became a line manager, I was lucky, I had actually received training on the importance of performance appraisals and how to run them. The time came and I was ready. Except I wasn’t ready for the wave of negativity. Employees came in to my office and slumped on the chair ready for what they clearly considered was a pointless annual appraisal. I tried my best, I used all the techniques I had been taught. I got feedback from peers, I considered strengths, weaknesses, opportunities. I spent hours putting the text together for the appraisal and further hours working out the SMART goals for the next year. But to no avail. Perhaps I wasn’t doing it right. I tried other ways but somehow over many cycles of these and different employers and employees I have never managed to work out the right formula. It was the same with my own appraisals – I never felt they really added much to what I already knew. And my sense of disappointment and unfairness at getting a “Meets Expectations” one year where I thought I had achieved so much lasted a long time.
Could it be that actually the annual appraisal process itself is not fit for purpose in the modern world of work? In fact, perhaps it never was. So much of what we do is team work, it is actually quite tricky to separate out the individual contribution. And things change so quickly in organizations. What seems important when goals are set may be irrelevant even two months later. As for SMART goals, there are many critiques of these and I have really been left questioning their value. They encourage you to set targets you know you’re going to achieve rather than challenging ones you might fail at. The challenging ones will bring your performance rating down. I’ve been in organizations that spent months going round and round trying to agree SMART objectives for the year and only getting there by May (when the appraisal year started in January, five months earlier!) And there were way too many goals that employees only looked at when the manager reminded them.
As to the actual rating process, I have never come across one that worked well. Many seemed based on the 5 point scale (1=Unacceptable Performance, 2=Needs Improvement, 3=Meets Expectations, 4=Exceeds Expectations, 5=Exceptional Performance). As the resident data nerd in one organization, I was given all the data on ratings to crunch to see what the distribution looked like. You can probably guess. 0.2% got a 1 rating, 0.8% got a 2 rating, and 0.2% got a 5 rating. In other words, 98.8% of people got a 3 or 4 rating. Managers tend to choose the middle ratings because it is easier – explaining the extreme values to employees and superiors is hard work.
Of course, good managers do much better. They manage performance on an ongoing basis. The annual performance appraisal becomes more of an administrative burden. Isn’t it about time we got rid of this failed approach and got managers managing performance with their employees on an ongoing basis? They could talk about strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, ways to grow without worrying about comparing individuals using numbers.
With employees and managers hating the process of annual performance appraisals, isn’t it about time we ditched them in favour of a continuous assessment approach and an ongoing focus on goals – for both the employee and organization? If you’re wondering how that might work, take a look here.
A phrase often wrongly attributed to Einstein but actually thought to be from the sociologist, William Bruce Cameron should give us pause for thought when using ratings for annual performance appraisals: “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.
Want to learn more about using KPIs correctly? Drop me a line! Or take a look at the training opportunities.
Picture: Rizkyharis CC BY-SA 4.0
Text: © 2017 Dorricott MPI Ltd. All rights reserved.