Tips to make your next performance appraisal powerful & effective

Managers and human resource professionals often struggle with the linking of performance management and performance appraisal to performance pay or merit pay. It makes intuitive sense to reward the most valuable employees, but the practice is not a simple one, since it is common to create undesired and unanticipated side effects regardless of how you [...]

Before you take the leap into performance appraisal with your team, does each role have a clear, current, and effective position description in place? Position descriptions or job descriptions are one of the most useful HR documents you can have. Like most things, the format of the job description is not as relevant as the [...]

We’ve written an article entitled “The Ten Stupid Things Managers Do To Screw Up Performance Appraisals”, but the truth is that managers don’t do dumb things just to fill up their time. A lotof the time we find that when managers are doing performance appraisals badly, they are getting a lot of “help”from their human [...]

Too many managers see performance reviews as something they “do” to employees and not something that have “done” to them. The hardest people to tie to a chair to discuss their performance are usually the CEO and Executive team – and yet their performance arguably has the greatest effect on the business. Employees watch how [...]

Recession is defined as an overall slowdown in the economics of a country, region or the world over a continual period of time. It is the time when companies as well as employees experience a low morale on the work and compensation front. Companies may also find it more challenging to appraise, motivate and empower [...]

Many people complain that their annual performance review is not relevant as their duties and responsibilities have substantially changed since they set their last goals and objectives. This is a real challenge for many businesses. While some jobs stay fundamentally the same from year to year, other jobs flow and change almost like an amoeba. [...]

1. Lack Of Focus On Performance You’re measuring how well an employee has achieved job goals: how well the employee has performed at work. It’s not a measure of “dress” or “demeanour” or “attitude” or “relationships” or any of those fuzzy, waffly, social and emotional attributes that some managers love to include, inappropriately, in performance [...]

As I have mentioned before, conducting performance appraisals is not an exact science. You will always look at an employee through the eyes of your biases and personal values. In performance reviews, you need to measure the results and the performance of the individual or team, and not the personality of the person. Reviews based [...]

Following on from previous posts, I thought I would share why I believe annual performance reviews are useful. Human beings are hard wired in for reflection and goal setting – think about New Year’s Resolutions. They are the most common form of goal setting on the planet – and yet no one forces people to [...]

One of the most regular comments I have heard over the years is that annual performance reviews are just a waste of time. The reasons they give are that people hate doing them, they are just a crutch for poor managers to be seen to be doing something, there is no link to pay so [...]