It’s the height of summer and the UK’s workforce is working flat out. With concerns over public sector spending cuts and pay freezes to the fore and ‘knock-on’ effects expected across the private sector, employees are striving to hit targets and perform to the best of their ability.
But towards the end of the year, with Christmas just around the corner, will staff still be working as hard as they were in the middle of July? Employees can be forgiven for relaxing a little as another tough year winds down, but for many companies, December is the month when they conduct their annual performance and pay reviews.
Of course, these reviews should look at what has been achieved over the past twelve months but many managers will inevitably focus disproportionately on how staff have performed in recent weeks. This is known as the ‘recency effect’. In other words, employees may fall prey to ‘December syndrome’, leading to reviews that do not truly reflect their performance over the year as a whole.
Fortunately a new breed of performance management solutions are now emerging which allow these issues to be more effectively addressed. Such systems mitigate against the effects of December syndrome by providing a more comprehensive picture of an employee’s performance over the entire year and ensuring there are no lengthy ‘gaps’ in feedback.
They do this by capturing performance-based feedback from a vast range of projects – typically run by a broad range of different people – which take place over the year as a whole. Project review summaries can typically be included on the yearly appraisal form, helping review managers to combat December syndrome by providing them with a complete picture of the employee’s performance over the entire year, all in one place.
Capturing this information and making it readily available is critical to a more rounded and more objective review process. After all, the modern workforce is increasingly fluid and a matrix reporting relationship in which a career manager and a range of different project managers supervise an employee’s work at different times is typical within most organisations.
And the best of these systems provide additional flexibility in that they not only enable managers to deliver real-time, ad hoc performance reviews, they also allow employees themselves to drive their own career development by creating their own reviews, requesting feedback for a project and proactively populating their annual appraisal with this information throughout the year.
In order to be able to deliver accurate and objective reviews, managers need a holistic view of the workforce. Technology can give them the level of insight they need to better evaluate employee performance over the whole year, provide constructive feedback and identify new areas for development and ensure that all staff are measured in the same way, guaranteeing fair reviews and providing a powerful antidote to December syndrome.
James O’Gorman is solutions specialist manager, EMEA, SumTotal Systems
