by Purple Doodles

Created on: May 07, 2009

While a performance review is an indispensable exercise in every organization, a good performance review is much more than that. When done well, it plays a tremendous role in optimizing an employee's contribution in his role and setting him up for success and accelerated growth. Besides the employee, the organization also stands to gain enormously when every employee starts to improve in productivity and engagement with the company.

If we ponder the employee perceptions about a performance appraisal system of an organization, we will see that there is a wide variance in the perceptions. Some will view it as great. Some will view it as ineffective and pointless. And there will be perhaps many who will view it as indifferent. The appraisal system is the same for everybody. Then what causes the difference in perceptions?

Indeed it is the manager who uses the system. The system might be the same, but the manager plays a big role in implementing it and hence influencing perceptions about it. A manager can greatly influence how much a performance appraisal system is leveraged for the benefit of the individual as well as for the organization.

Here are some tips on what the managers can do to ensure that the performance appraisal system is done well.

Send a template with the 'agenda' for the review to the employee well before the actual review. This prepares the employee to know what to expect.

Address all issues that impact performance and issues that are a fallout of performance
o Issues that impact performance: workload, stress, 'distracters' in the workplace, changes in the workplace
o Issues that are fallout of performance: Compensation, incentives, new goals, and work-life balance.

Ask the employee to define success and the 'best case' scenario for each of the issue that is being reviewed. This will help the manager understand the employee's frame of reference and therefore help the manager clarify expectations better.

Maintain a comprehensive documentation of the reviews for each employee so that it provides continuity between successive reviews.

Encourage employees to talk about their personal goals too. Encourage them to share it with the team as well if they are comfortable. This will provide a developmental touch to the review.

Add the personal touch to the review process by giving each employee a write-up of the discussion.

Encourage peer feedback. This enables each employee to understand where he stands vis-vis the expectations of his team mates.

Have an informal dialogue at least once a month with each employee. This will help the employee make on course corrections when needed. That way the review will also not come across as punitive. Rather it will be perceived as proactively developmental.


o Review the non-metrics such as New learnings (new books that the employee has read, new seminars or workshops that he has attended, new skills that he has acquired etc) New experiences, New relationships etc

o Come prepared with numbers to serve as frames of reference usually the person's previous performance review. It is better even better if the previous performance reviews are available as a trend so it will show the progression and not just the most recent performance.

Learn more about this author, Purple Doodles.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.