Performance appraisal and its most notable benefits

28 of September, 2022

If you want a successful enterprise, you need your employees to be at the top of their game. As a manager of employees you must keep their morale up, train them, specialize them, allocate work to them, and deliver the performance appraisals required. But you also have to, as part of their whole learning and developing process, enact a system that draws the benefits of performance appraisal.

The benefits of a performance appraisal in terms of development are vast. Employees can learn about what can help improve their productivity. They can also be a valuable source of information. Performance appraisal is by nature a systematic evaluation of the employee’s performance. But done well the benefits of performance appraisal can become much more than that. Let us see how.

Performance appraisal methods

There are several types of performance appraisals. To draw the benefits of a performance appraisal method out to the max, one has to know which kind of performance appraisals are suited to what kind of outcome you want. Some examples of performance appraisals include:

• The standard appraisal: A more common appraisal method. This evaluation is based on a score that is a standardized rating scale for each employee in the company. You can be evaluated on several aspects of your work out of 10. The advantages of this system is that it is easy to create via an HR app or survey program, and is easy coded into a larger quantitative evaluation of your enterprise. The disadvantage is that it lacks a qualitative dimension and two-way feedback.
• Group assessment: If you are a small team in your department, managers have the choice of doing a group assessment where each employee, usually anonymously, picks out the good and bad points of each others work. The information is then shared and the employee gets an honest insight into what their colleagues think of them.
• Self-assessment appraisal: Self-assessment allow the employee to give themselves an auto-evaluation.
• 360 or all-encompassing assessment: this is a more wide-scale, long term assessment technique where you can draw all the benefits of a performance appraisal.

How to draw the benefits of performance appraisals?

For this you must first choose the type of appraisal accordingly. Want a quantitative study of a large team? A standard appraisal might be the way to go. If you’re looking to build a team dynamic and see how you can get individual employees to work better within a small team you can do a group assessment exercise.

Next you can follow these tips (according to the type of performance appraisal) to see the benefits of performance appraisal:

• You must always check the validity and reliability of your appraisal and evaluation studies, especially if you do these appraisals in a survey format. Validity refers to whether the evaluation tool is adequate enough to measure what you want to. You may want to check the different types of appraisals above to see what works best.
• You must create a climate where the managers and employees respectively can deliver or take feedback in a positive way and in return give their honest opinion and not feel pressured or threatened enough to deliver results that are skewered accordingly.
• A strong follow up process to each appraisal meeting is also of added value in this case.

What are the advantages of performance appraisal for employees

Performance appraisal allows employees to harness numerous benefits for their own self-development. These include:

• Knowing what exactly they can improve on in future work.
• Boost their morale and motivation with positive evaluations and feedback.
• Have SMART goals and objectives that allow them to have an understanding of what is required at the level they are working at.
• Give them training in the respective areas they feel they are struggling in.

What are the most notable benefits of performance appraisal?

As a manager or HR team member, you obtain some crucial information yourself about your team when conducting appraisals, including:

• Raw data on employee satisfaction and performance rates with their work and whether they need additional training. You can identify under performers and help them get to the right level.
• Examine where the employee feels they have done well according to their time allocated to specific tasks.
• Understand how a specific team dynamic is working and where processes could be improved between two team members.
• If appraisals are done well, you can eliminate any culture of fear or impostor syndromes amongst your employees of the management, as they continue to share feedback to improve the organization as a whole.