Expert Author Susan Leigh
Staff appraisals often fill employers and employees alike with dread. They carry memories of school report cards and of being tested and measured. They can be time consuming and for many reluctant employers they are felt to significantly reduce the time available spent doing their core business of finding customers and earning money.
However a business needs to support enthusiastic, motivated staff in order to keep ahead of the competition and subsequently to grow and expand. Identifying these staff and treating them as a powerful key resource should be an important part of any business action plan.
Used well, a staff appraisal can be an excellent opportunity to find key enthusiastic staff who want to develop, improve themselves and add value to the business. Good staff are potentially your company's future management team, so identifying these key staff members, where their interests and skill sets lie and how they see their future career path developing can be a valuable contribution to your company's future success.
Identifying members of staff who are willing and keen to be developed, take on more responsibility and move through various training opportunities is a key element of a good appraisal scheme. It firstly identifies peoples strengths and weaker areas, how each staff member feels that they are performing their tasks, how the manager feels that they are doing, and then moves into identifying future plans for improvement, challenge setting, career development. Done well this provides support and nurturing, training and also being given the opportunity to learn, make mistakes and take on responsibility.
A positive staff appraisal can be used to encourage and reward, tell staff about their successes and regularly measure how much they have improved. It will identify weaknesses too, but in a positive way, backed up by a plan of action to remedy the problems and find ways to strengthen and improve those areas.
Negative appraisals are used in a critical way, to highlight flaws, shortcomings and failures, to justify a lack of promotion or benefits. Interestingly a recent survey revealed that staff prefer a company with a negative appraisal scheme to no scheme at all. The overall view was that negative attention was preferable to no attention at all.
A lack of any appraisal scheme often results in a company continuing to do what it has always done without any prompt to identify success or failure. Staff often feel that they are doing a job, the job that they are paid to do, without any real interest from management. Whereas at least a negative appraisal scheme means that someone has looked at their work and has commented on it.
A company that is looking to survive and grow values the importance of utilising all potential tools to motivate and inspire its staff to greater efforts and levels of success. Taking the time to appraise staff often results in them motivating themselves and asking for further challenges and opportunities to develop their skills. That is an invaluable result for any business looking to improve.