Employee Performance Review

Be it a new employee or somebody who has been around for a while, Performance appraisals and Progress reviews are done as a necessity.  It is important to realize that there is a difference in the two terms, as with the term Performance Evaluation too.  While this difference may not seem like much, the true blue HR would want to know though.  More and more companies are shifting to real-time appraisal, rather than a quarterly or half yearly or annual.  There are different methods of conducting Performance Appraisal and Review and in this post I will list them  out and further a look at 360 degree methodology.

Performance Appraisal vs Reviews.

Performance appraisal is the name given to when companies seek to give feedback to employees about their performance, and to create a development plan for the employee.  For a new hire there is not much in terms of feedback on work but more in terms of training and development for the first 3 months .  Feedback about work is reserved for retained employees, who have been there for a while, perhaps more than 3 months.  Often a Progress review or Performance review is done to make the employee aware of how close he or she is to achieving their baseline goals.

Performance Appraisal & Reviews

Performance reviews will include goal setting, a review of job competencies and a development plan.  The Performance Review is linked to salary and bonuses and this is where the Journey Evaluator kicks in too, to give a 100% accurate evaluation of Performance.  Performance reviews are frequently in many companies become real-time, which is to imply employees are being reviewed every minute for their performance.  I spoke to MD of Vikram Solar, Mr Gyanesh Chaudhary, and he said,”Victories and defeats at work is an everyday affair, and when you conduct reviews quarterly, bi-annually or annually, they tend to get buried under piles of work, we are focussing on reviewing in real-time.”

In short a Performance Appraisal is to measure how effective an employee is, while a Performance Review is an evaluation of the employees performance.

Methods for Reviewing performance

There are a lot of methods for Performance Reviews and we take a closer look at these as below, always remembering that a modern day organization is a fast moving organism and sometimes chooses to have a combination of review methodologies.  Here are the Performance review methods:

• Comparison method
  This is the method in which the employees are compared directly to one another.  The tools used to do this include:
  Ranked Performance – The method in which the supervisor ranks the employees based on highest and lowest performance.
  Paired comparison – comparing one employees performance against all others in the group.
  Forced Distribution – Uses a Bell curve to visually represent high, average and low performers.
• Narrative method
  This method seeks the manager to write descriptions about employee performance instead of using ranking scales or checklists.  The manager has to be sure about the incident and when it occurred, be it a victory or defeat for the employee.  He is also needed to write about the behaviour of the employee.  This essay method can use questions to ask the supervisor or be more free form.
• Rated method
  The Rated method uses tools and checklists and utilizes the  Likert scale, it could be ratings between the Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree as also a rating on a scale of 1-5, where 1 is low performance and 5 is high performance.  Rating scales are often utilized in conjunction with other methods.  At NIIT Ltd, I spoke to the MD Rajendra Singh Pawar, “We utilize the Rated scale with the Narrative method, Checklist and BARS, a combination of the four” he said.  A challenge to this method is that it is highly subjective therefore sometimes people employ other methods with it.  The point that I make, however, is that if Rating could give objective results it would be the most utilized method of all time.  At Mr. Pinker Technology, we utilize the Rating scale in the Journey Evaluator to give the best results.
• BARS
  Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scale uses anchoring statements, while scaled in format, it provides additional information about what constitutes satisfactory or unsatisfactory performance.  BARS must be customized for each job in the organization., built up from standardized job descriptions.
• Checklist method
  The checklist method has the supervisor or the rater having to check certain behavioural statements like, “He is always late in delivering work,”  “Has poor follow through on projects” etc.
• 360 deg Feedback
  Few jobs have an independent window, which is to say that they impact only the department the employee works in or the team they are with.  Most jobs need feedback from Suppliers, Customers, other department Supervisors and Managers, as also feedback from other Teams.  If you are the boss, this method would also ask the juniors to give feedback on your performance.
• Self Assessment
  This method asks the employee to give feedback on their own performance on the premise of self assessment.
  

360 degree Methodology

The key point to remember here is that if the data you receive from this method is true then you will get the results as specified in this section of the article.  Data is described as 360 degrees if it is collecting information from all around the organization and it is suppliers and customers.  The concept was first initialized in 1940s Germany during World War II and then went to the US in the 1970s and to the UK in 1992.  The thing I like about this concept is that it could keep the HR busy conceptualizing it for a couple of years, but once in place, the organization runs like a dream machine.

The data for this methodology of evaluation can be reached by asking everyone impacted by your job for feedback.  Interestingly if the identity of the reviewer is kept anonymous the feedback starts to get very specific, but the more specific it is, the clearer the source.  So in fact, it is the Specificity vs Anonymity conundrum.  Points to consider:

• Clearly, to be specific you have to move away from anonymity.
• There are also the numbers to consider, having feedback come from 2 peers or colleagues might be easy to handle but anonymity is at stake, and on the other side, if the feedback is given by 10 peers, the veracity of the data is at stake, you might lose out on the subtleties.
• The last point is whether to focus on Assessment or Development.

In effect, 360 degree feedback exposes the full details of what others know about you that you don’t know, as also exposes details of things that you are covering up or hiding.

Advantages of 360 degree feedback can be summarized as below:

• 360 gives feedback on behaviour in a very specific way.
• 360 degree feedback is not a condemnation of a person but a way to develop them.
• 360 degree is an opinion not a judgement
• 360 degree feedback clearly demarcates the goodwill that a person has generated.
• 360 degree feedback is a reflection of the leadership trend in the organization.

Clearly, the data generated by 360 degree feedback, if it reflects the above 5 points, then it is correctly configured in the organization.