How are you being APPRAISED at the workplace?

Usually, well before the organisational restructuring exercise and salary adjustment, performance appraisal would have been carried out by most companies that have in place formal HR practices. In the past, employees' performance appraisals were usually carried out in a confidential, secretive and hush-hush manner. The employees would never get a chance to see the evaluations, comments and recommendations made by their superiors.

In the 1980's when Open Performance Appraisal was gaining more acceptance, many companies started conducting open performance appraisals on their employees. Evaluations are made more rational with scores and ranking on various evaluation criteria or factors. The employees'strengths and weaknesses on the job are being identified, discussed and recommendations made to help the employees to improve their performance or to develop their strengths. This has provided a channel for employees to discuss with their superiors on their work performance and to understand the expectations of their superiors.

But, such open appraisals must be supported with good record keeping throughout the appraisal period because most superiors tend to have short memory, they usually would forget incidents that took place 11 months ago, and selectively remember whatever that happened in the recent months. If the recent incidents happen to be the negative ones, they would negate the entire good performance over the period preceeding these incidents. This would be unfair to the employees. So, it is important that superiors keep a good account of incidents that had taken place so that all ratings and scores are backed by specific records and data. This would prevent subjective evalutions and possible arguments.

I have seen some superiors who are lazy and clueless about what is going on with their subordinates to tend to hand out the performance appraisal forms to the employees and ask them to fill up themselves. In such instances, employees tend to be more reserved in their own scores and ratings because generally, most of them have not much confidence in themselves. I encourage employees to have full confidence in themselves, be honest and truthful to how you assess yourselves. If you are excellent, just indicate that you are excellent. But, make sure you substantiate with facts and figures.