I just responded to a post on CIPD regarding designing a performance appraisal form. Just in case you don’t avidly read CIPD forums ! I thought I’d outline my response here.
“In broad principle, I would follow the following process
* What purposes has the form got to serve (rightly or wrongly the performance appraisal form is important to the organisation for a variety of reasons), e.g.
* Record objectives for later reference
* Cascading of organisational objectives / goals
* Identify individual training needs
* Assign a grade for performance related pay purposes
* Identify the competencies that you wish employees to be strong in
* Gain c.v. like information for internal recruitment
* Identify high flyers etc.
* Decide now whether the form/process can deliver all of this
* Begin to design the form content – go for completeness initially. I’d be surprised if a couple of other organisations wouldn’t give you their forms to give you a flavour of what people capture and to get some ideas going on how best to garner the infromation
* Look more at the performance review process than the performance appraisal form. The form only needs to capture the salient parts of the conversation on performance, objectives or development. So, a nicely laid out form with a couple of opportunities to add free text is more likely to be completed than endless free text options.
* Get a small number of people involved to review your proposal – I don’t know the size of your organisation. If it is large, then do this earlier
o HR
o Training
o Manager(s)
o Appraisee(s)
* Start to look at the communication process….ok, I’m starting to go off your original topic.”
I’m currently writing a white paper on performance appraisals – you can register to receive our newsletters from this blog or our website – and this will be a starting point for me. It doesn’t feel complete yet, but it’s not the worst start on getting the performance review form designed.
Brendan
