HR Basics: Performance Appraisals

HR Basics is a series of short courses, designed to highlight what you need to know about a particular human resource management topic. In today’s HR Basics, we explore performance appraisals, focusing on the development and management of effective performance review tools.

Strong performance appraisals are the backbone of effective performance management, let’s start with a couple of definitions. Performance Management refers to the processes to ensure the organization connects mission with the work of employees.

Performance appraisals (also known as performance reviews) guide the process of determining how well employees do their jobs relative to a standard and communicating that information to them. Performance appraisals ensure effective outcomes of performance management are realized.

For the purposes of this course, we will look at the development and management of performance appraisals. By development we mean the process of creating performance appraisals. And by management we mean planning, organizing and leading performance appraisals.

While it’s up to an organization to decide what elements to include in an appraisal, there are some recommended elements - Demographic information, a standardized rating method, Job-related assessment, Self-evaluation, SMART Goals, and Employee development. These standard elements will create a user friendly and useful appraisal tool for your organization.

Our second area of focus highlights the importance of managing your performance appraisal process through training, maintaining high standards of feedback and strong documentation.

Regardless of the approach used, managers need to understand the intended outcome of performance management. When performance management is genuinely used to develop employees as resources, it works. In its simplest form performance appraisal is observation - Here are your strengths and weaknesses, and here is a way to develop for the future.