Linking appraisals to reward

I'd always thought working towards agreed goals and achieving them should be rewarded. If you have an appraisal system that doesn't actually reward you then what does it matter? For me, demonstrating values, behaviours and achieving objectives meant I really worked on them.

I'd always thought working towards agreed goals and achieving them should be rewarded.

Yes, with *continued employment*.

In principle, I agree with you that continuous informal appraisal if the ideal. However, there are a number of challenges in practice.

First is the main issue with informal appraisal, which is that, more often than not, it doesn't get recorded. So when there's a challenge and someone's performance is called into question there's no established evidence trail either way when the employee says "but no one ever told me there was a problem before now!"

Second is the problem with communication. What managers say and what employees hear in informal appraisal are often markedly different. When a manager says "I feel like you have some areas I'd like to see you work on for the next quarter" they think they're saying "you're not meeting my expectations and if you don't sort yourself out I'm going to fire you", whereas the employee hears "I'd like you to be better at this stuff, but you're basically doing fine". Even when this doesn't collide with the first point, it results in effort being incorrectly allocated.

Third is the issue of perception. A manager has a five minute chat with someone in the break room and thinks they've done an appraisal, whereas the employee thinks they were just shooting the breeze,

Finally is the issue of time. When managers hear the word "informal", they generally understand this to mean "unimportant". If there's no recording going on and no dedicated structure to follow in the conversation, they don't allocate the completion of ongoing appraisals a high priority, which means that none of the problems above happen because the appraisals themselves never happen.

At the same time, of course, formalized annual appraisals are a huge problem. They cause enormous stress and pressure, consume vast amounts of time and energy and achieve almost none of what they set out to achieve.

My preferred solution has been to try to take what's good from formal appraisals (structure, recording, planning) and what's good about informal appraisals (brevity, low pressure) and combine them into light-touch quarterly appraisals that can be done in person or by email. It's largely a tick-box exercise that seeks to answer one basic question: is the employee achieving what the business needs them to achieve? If the answer is "yes", the process is quick, simple and painless. If the answer is "no", then it shifts rails to an HR-supported procedure in which the areas where the employee is failing are specifically identified and articulated and a pathway back to improvement is agreed.

The Holy Grail of continuous informal appraisal is only achievable in a business where *every* manager is a trained, experienced professional people manager.

Robey's hit the nail on the head for me here. Having well trained experienced professional people managers is so important, and I think especially so if the appraisal process is linked to reward.

At my ex-employer, although HR made a valiant effort to provide clear guidance for the box marking process, the implementation varied greatly from manager to manager. The result been that there was no fairness to the distribution of rewards. The attitude that an individual's manager had towards the system (and towards the employee) had at least as much influence on the rating given as the employee's performance did.

I agree that 'informal' appraisals have the risk of becoming no appraisals at all.

I think for me, the key starting point is to begin by being clear about what you want to achieve though the process and then take an evidence based approach to deciding the best way to reach that goal.

Robey's hit the nail on the head for me here. Having well trained experienced professional people managers is so important, and I think especially so if the appraisal process is linked to reward.

At my ex-employer, although HR made a valiant effort to provide clear guidance for the box marking process, the implementation varied greatly from manager to manager. The result been that there was no fairness to the distribution of rewards. The attitude that an individual's manager had towards the system (and towards the employee) had at least as much influence on the rating given as the employee's performance did.

I agree that 'informal' appraisals have the risk of becoming no appraisals at all.

I think for me, the key starting point is to begin by being clear about what you want to achieve though the process and then take an evidence based approach to deciding the best way to reach that goal.