One of the constants of my working life has been the periodic need to submit to performance appraisals. It doesn’t matter where I’ve worked, the ‘a’ word has invariably come up at one point or another. I’ve often found that being appraised is a disheartening experience. When I’ve been employed as a manager I’ve also had conduct appraisals. Sadly, that’s often been an even more disheartening experience than being an appraisee, so I can just imagine how the people I was appraising felt. If you have ever been one of them, I apologise. Until I started the personnel selection and assessment module on my MSc, I’d never really thought about what good practice should look like.
For example, regardless of the side of the desk I’ve been sitting, I’ve often thought of appraisals as being a total waste of time that got in the way of the “real work”. This is probably because most of the organisations that I’ve been a part of have seemed to use them as little more than tick-box exercises to justify the existence of HR(*). Needless to say, that’s not a good reason for putting together an appraisal system! You can easily tell when that’s the case – as neither you or your manager ever refers to the information that’s been painstakingly gathered, written up and agreed to. Rather than being a living framework that drives the behaviour of both the employee and employer, bad appraisal processes simply result in documents that gather dust in the bottom of a filing cabinet somewhere.
Implemented well, appraisals should be able to motivate, develop and reward employees while enabling the employer to understand the potential of the people they have invested in. Perhaps my experiences have been unfortunate in that I’ve rarely worked for organisations where an occupational psychologist has had any input into the design and conduct of the appraisal process – and just as importantly, into the training of the people conducting appraisals. Yet the insights offered by occupational psychology into motivation, development and systems of reward are fascinating and organisations that take these insights seriously often seem to perform better than those that don’t.
(*) Not my current organisation as it happens – we seem to have a system in place that does add real value!
This article was originally written for the University of Leicester Student Blogs, 1st March 2014.