I just went through 70 performance appraisal forms of different companies worldwide and once again I was shocked! Most of them were almost completely backwards minded and deficit oriented.
This is no surprise at all if you look at the defined goals of performance appraisals: “to give feedback on performance to employees, identify employee training needs, document criteria used to allocate organizational rewards, etc.” And what are these companies doing that for? They actually seem to forget their main goal: to earn money and therefore to increase or at least safeguard the performance of their employees.
If you want an increased performance of your employees then use the tool “performance appraisal” in a solution focused and motivating way and look into the future.
Try out the following questions the next time and experience the difference:
- Imagine we come together in exactly one year from now to do the next performance appraisal. What will you have achieved? What else? What will you especially be proud of?
- How will you have done that? What exactly will you have contributed to this success?
- If you look at a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 stands for “we haven’t even started to reach these goals” and 10 means “we have already achieved them completely”. What do you think: Where are we now? What have we already done that we are not at 1 anymore?
- What did you do in the last year to make sure that we are not at 1 anymore? What worked out well? What will you do more of in the next year? etc.
If you look back, don’t judge the deficits, but use the resources that are there to build on them. This is not only more motivating, but also a lot more performance increasing.
If you are interested to read more about solution focused performance appraisals, leave a comment or contact me to analyze and improve the performance appraisals in your company.
Best regards
Dominik Godat
Dominik…. your article is very true since most organizations I’ve worked for have somehow built this culture where persons shortcomings are highlighted in performance appraisals rather than assisting the candidate with tools to achieve organization goals…. Thanks Hiten
Hi,
Would like to have some more reading material..
Can you help!!
-Esther.
Hi,
I would like to receive some more information/reading material regarding this topic.
Thank you,
Brenda
Thank you Brenda, Esther and Hiten for your comments. I will come back to you with some more material concerning this topic. If you like, you can subscribe by email to this blog to receive an email with my next blog
articles.
I really like the way your questions help drive a mutually beneficial conversation about what one has achieved. However, I have two concerns
1) is that they are event based – (at the end of the year).and
2) they are outcome focused versus a balance of outcomes, responsibilities and behaviors. For example, someone can achieve a goal but in a way that is not aligned with the desired behaviors of the company.
The above mentioned gaps (in my experience) always result in people being surprised at the results of the PAs and to process that is disconnected to execution of the business strategy.
So,
How do you use PAs drive execution real – time?
How do you use PAs as a process to create a coaching environment versus a one time event?
Thanks!
Hi Dominik,
How utterly refreshing for someone to confirm what I have supsected for some time, that performance management is out of synch with the goals of most organisations and quite backward in its approach.
I am deeply cyncial about the entire approach and the dearth of sanctimonous HR material on the subject.. I would love to read something that approaches it in more business realistic manner.