Could a business improve its organisational performance without using an annual appraisal process? Could performance management ever change from being a top down to a bottom up process?  Could you afford to abandon performance reviews altogether?  Some interesting questions but we can’t get away from one fact; employees need to know where they stand and organisations need to know how employees are doing. But, how would we achieve this without the performance appraisal?

In many organisations a performance appraisal is currently used for a number of reasons; giving feedback, coaching, setting goals, setting pay rises and bonuses, measuring performance, identifying training and development needs, boosting motivation and providing recognition. All this important information lumped into one end of year formal meeting . Often this meeting is met with dread, fear, anxiety or disillusionment by employee and sometimes even manager.  An hour’s formal meeting is seemingly all it takes to analyse one year of an employee’s hard work, create a learning and development plan, set objectives for the following year and even sometimes set bonus or pay rise. Often the information used is calculated using unreliable ratings or out of date statistics gathered from employee, manager and sometimes, if using 360 degree feedback, other team members.  Not forgetting that the success of the meeting relies on the fact that the manager is a good coach and the employee is receptive. In a matter of minutes, a previously motivated employee could turn into a shrinking violet. So, what’s the alternative or is there one?

It’s true people need and want to know how they’re doing and understand the information that may influence their career development or pay but is it really necessary to discuss so much and place so much emphasis on one or two meetings a year? This not only puts pressure on the ability of the manager but also on the relationship between the employee and the manager.

With this in mind, I think the first step in the journey to re-thinking your appraisal process should be to consider an appraisal as a number of different processes.  These processes could be divided into goals, coaching and development, feedback and recognition, remuneration, and motivation for example.

Over the next week or so my blog will take each of these processes individually and look at how they could be implemented differently and more creatively to eventually negate the need for an annual review.