PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL

One of the most strained and complicated times in the year for career professionals is their appraisal periods. It is frankly an annoyance for both the supervisors and the subordinates, and while it is something we mostly do not want to do, it is pertinent that it is done, otherwise how do we measure performance as organisations and pinpoint areas of improvement and how do we understand our strength and weaknesses and grow as career people and as individuals,

I find that those who are most effective and at peace during this period are those (supervisor and subordinate alike) who have the ability to be objective, and fair irrespective of their personal feelings because let’s face it as humans we favour people differently.

Imagine that you were a team member who constantly argued with their supervisor after every appraisal about the scores assigned even when you did not do the work, even for tasks that you obviously did not carry out or achieve a resolution. For example a specified key performance indicator( KPI) that had specific tasks assigned, you failed to achieve the task on the stipulated due date because of your own laxities and now appraisal comes and you are scored in line with your performance on that task and you begin to question your supervisor. Rather than looking inward and taking responsibilities for your failings, you simply expect that for some reason because good appraisal scores are tied to certain benefits your supervisor should understand and just hand you the scores, and then when he/she doesn’t, you cry foul; whereas if you could be truly honest and objectively examine your actions over the course of the period you will realise that you got the appropriate scores for your performance.

Now imagine that individual as a supervisor(leader), it is more likely that they will be unable to objectively appraise their subordinates putting their personal feelings aside. They are more likely to have their judgement of their subordinate’s performance on the job skewed by their personal feelings towards that individual as against how he/she has performed in relation to assigned KPIs.

While the above is a limited scenario, it makes for a bigger discussion on how to truly judge objectively as humans especially for qualitative metrics. For me I say for every qualitative metrics, assign a quantitative measure to it at the beginning of the period that is clear and acceptable to everyone. For example, how do you judge if a member of your team is a team player, he/she maybe a team player with certain team mates and not be with others, this is simply human nature since we cannot all be friends with each other and have different personalities, however you are trying to build a complete team not a divided one and you don’t need to be friends to be cordial and effective team mates. So, you assign specific tasks to every teammate that ensures that they have to interact with the whole team to achieve results and then you measure the success of that task in relation to how the individual was able to coordinate the team as well as check the response of the other team members as well. This method can also be done with measures like “leadership”, “client management abilities” etc.

I am a firm believer in assigning quantitative measures to qualitative metrics and while this is not full proof, I can assure you that it helps to make you as the supervisor(leader) measure more objectively and easily at the end of the period and allow most subordinates understand and accept their performance if they can be objective.