One of the common tools used by businesses to motivate their employees to work hard is performance appraisal. It can be applied to evaluate the job performance of a worker that spans over a period of one year. More so, it serves as a report card that managers can look to assess their employees’ work ethics and serves as the basis for rewards or punishments.
Although not all types of performance appraisals are considered the same, this can gauge how individuals are to be remunerated based on how good they are in a particular department. Well, here are a few strengths and weaknesses that can support the existence of performance appraisal in a company.
List of Strengths of Performance Appraisal
1. Create a Thorough Overview of an Employee’s Work Ethics
Feedbacks are a way to show how an employee has been doing over the past year. Basically, it can be written over several pages of document to point out their strengths and weaknesses. So depending on whatever they have done in the past serves as a turning point to improve or to revise.
2. Guide for Setting Goals for the Year Ahead
Aside from giving feedbacks to its employees, a company can help them to set specific goals that should guide them for the next year. For example, an employee can use this to pursue promotion or any opportunity to work in another position. With the guidance of their department manager, they can pave the way for the best personnel to keep for at least a year.
3. Making Adjustments in a Friendly Manner
A negative approach through confrontation on the employee’s performance can bring about negativity that can affect an entire team in a particular department. Although some actions like this can be justified, it can still be harsh for some. Perhaps this can be averted by expressing these thoughts into writing. Feedbacks like this can often be more acceptable than verbal expression.
List of Weaknesses of Performance Appraisal
1. A Single Document is Not Enough
Workers do their best every single day to achieve what they have been tasked to do. Keeping a list of their tasks done in a year can’t be put into one document alone. It only serves to highlight the best and worst from the previous year. This can be bias not knowing what they have really gone through for the past year.
2. Managers Might Not Complete Performance Appraisals
Some managers might be lazy enough to give a complete review of an employee’s performance. So there is a tendency that judgment can be biased if they only provide an average review. Since most of this type of managers hate to fill out paperwork for several workers, they ought to think it is just a waste of energy, time, and paperwork.
3. Employees Don’t Receive this Type of Feedback
Most employees that leave before the annual feedback is done will have no chances of getting evaluated. If ever they did, it can be due to a negative performance of their duties. This can be considered caring less of the company for their employees, which ends up leading them to seek out a different job.