Common Mistakes Reviewing a Performance Appraisal

Have you been able to keep track of, how well your employees have been performing? Conducting a performance review is a great way to keep track of the people responsible for the success of your business.

If conducted effectively your performance review lets you gain a deeper understanding of each employee’s role in your business, the specific challenges they face, and their work abilities.

However, if you get it wrong, performance appraisals can give your key decision makers little useful information on how employees are performing and result in employees feeling as if they aren’t being graded fairly or truly appreciated.

Worse yet, when completed ignored, a lack of performance appraisals can result in your business losing track of how each employee contributes to its overall success.

The core objective of a business conducting performance appraisals is effectively reviewed that every employee is working towards its business objectives? Our experience with reviewing performance appraisals has provided us with an insight into a few common mistakes businesses make today.

Avoiding sharing important information with employees

Sharing important information with employees as part of their performance appraisal is absolutely essential today.

Millennials today are looking for constant review and feedback so gone are the days where employees were happy with businesses conducting an annual review. I would rather say a regular performance review could also be an integral part of your employee engagement.

Managers at times leave out suggestions & improvements as part of the appraisal, to avoid offending their employees rather be open to sharing areas and scope of improvement. This works as a road map and helps employees work towards a common business goal.

Not providing actionable feedback and suggestions

Sometimes performance appraisal may provide vague suggestions that are simply hard to implement rather that receiving actionable feedback that could be vital in improving performance. Businesses sometimes work with performance appraisals with vague metrics not really designed to meet their business needs.

This sometimes ends with a disaster as employees are unable to relate to these vague metrics of success and failure that can’t be tied to actionable improvements. In this case, the scope of the review is only limited to their current performance with no concrete improvement plan.

So a performance appraisal should provide actionable, effective feedback and suggestions that can help them improve their workplace performance and generate better results.

 Assessing performance based only on recent events

Another common mistake observed has been, where the performance appraisal of the employee is impacted by a recent event. Such situations cause an overly negative picture of an otherwise talented, effective and productive employee vice versa a positive appraisal based on recent events for an employee who otherwise may not be performing to their potential. So to maintain a fair review an employer needs to list and review all success and pitfalls for the employee for the full duration of their review period.

Not providing praise when employees perform well

If you think it’s important to point out an employee’s mistakes and provide actionable feedback for improvement, it is equally important to praise employees who have performed well or beyond expectations. Recognition and rewards can be well aligned again with Employee engagement and your performance appraisals.
Many people wrongly associate performance appraisal with negativity, ways that managers would point out shortcomings or misses. There is a dire need to change this thinking and focus on the positivity, constructive feedback and grow employees with a vision.

This aspect can build and strengthen your relationship with your employees, motivate and improve productivity, these practices overall can help raise employee morale and help create an excellent work environment.
”Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”    – Stephen R. Covey