Question

''Some employees may not feel satisfied after going through performance appraisal with their superior''. Explain the problems that may occur in performance appraisal and recommend effective solutions.

Answer 1

Performance appraisal is the periodic and regular evauation of an employees work by his/her superiors. This is an evaluation of the skills and the work done by the employee over a certain duration of time. As useful as this may be for the success of the firm as well as the better performance of the employees, sometimes it might not be that fruitful and fail to achieve the desired results. This can be because of the following reasons -

1.) The incapability of the evaluator to be able to conduct a comprehensive review might result in wrong evaluation and hence not reflect the true capabilities of the employee.

2.) Every firm can have a million employees and conducting an appraisal for all the employees can be very time comsuming for the employers. This time be instead be used to conduct training sessions and other useful sessions.

3.) Sometimes the employers can fail to be completely objective in their evaluation. Personal biases towards certain employees on the part of their employers can distort the result of their evaluation thus not reflecting the true picture.

4.) Sometimes these performance appraisals can create additional pressure at the workplace for fear of having a negative review. Such pressure is bad for the productivity of the employees.

Effective solutions -

1.) One recomemndation can be to replace performation evaluation sessions with training sessions. Instead of projecting to the employees that they are under constant strutiny, it might be more effective to project that the firm is towards helping the employees develop their skills.

2.) Such evauation sessions can also be conducted in secret without the knowledge of the employee so that the employees are not under the pressure of being evaluated.

3.) For the effectiveness of such evaluations, it has to be conducted by some independent third party. Hence, it is important for these sessions to be conducted by personnel from the Human Resources who do not know the employees on a personal level.