Improving your appraisals

Everyone hates performance appraisals. They are a lose-lose proposition. Employees resent them because they feel they are useless and intimidating, and managers despise them because they are often ill-prepared for giving them and, besides, they have too many other things to do.

That’s a problem. The role of a manager is to bring out the very best in people, maximising their potential. A good manager judges his or her successes in counting the people who thrive working with them – as opposed to for them – in pursuit of a common cause. The questions asked in a performance appraisal make that happen, and are an important management tool.

Managers need to be better prepared for performance appraisals. The appraisal has to be part of their job, not an add-on that they feel simply creates more of a workload. To make it work, they need to ask the right questions.

SmartCompany spoke to several human resources specialists to identify the 11 most important questions that should be asked. Unfortunately, not many managers ask them.

1. 1. Over the past year, how have you found it working here? Be specific.

1. 2. On a scale of one to 10, where one is “not at all” and 10 equals “extremely”, how satisfied are you with various aspects of your role? Take into account remuneration, how challenging you find your role, tools and equipment, the work environment, and colleagues.

1. 3. What have been your most important achievements over the past year?

1. 4. Are there parts of your job you find difficult? What was your greatest challenge and how did you deal with it? With the benefit of hindsight, how could it have been handled differently? What would you change about your role if you could?

1. 5. What kind of job do you want to be doing in two or three years’ time? Where do you want to be heading from a career-path perspective? Do you have a personal interest or goal to develop? How can I help you get there?

1. 6. Which knowledge or skills would you like to develop to be better in your role? Do you have skills you are not using that would allow you to contribute more to the organisation?

1. 7. What would you change about your role if you could?

1. 8. Is there any particular project you would like some exposure on over the next year?

1. 9. Can you see any way the company can respond better to economic circumstances so that we can become more competent and efficient? Are there opportunities in the market you feel the company could take advantage of?

1. 10. What can I do to be a better manager?

1. 11. There has to be a discussion about salary and bonuses.

Some companies deliberately exclude salary discussions from the performance appraisal process. Michael Page director Shamini Thomas says that’s a mistake.

Employees are expecting it will be discussed, and there is no better forum than a performance appraisal. “Whether or not an increase is granted is a different story, but the whole topic of a salary review has to be addressed,” Thomas says.

How many managers ask these sorts of questions?

Margaret Harrison, a former human resources director at adidas Australia and organisational change manager at RACV, who now runs Our HR Company, says most managers conducting reviews just rely on formal position descriptions. Forget about the questions. “They will just go through it line by line,” Harrison says. “They say, ‘You have done that’, tick. ‘You did that’, tick.”

“Some HR departments get this terribly formal position on performance appraisals and rather than letting it be a free-flowing discussion and giving them some basic questions to ask, they make a big hash of it because they think you have to be formal about it. You don’t have to be formal about it at all.”

So why don’t managers like doing performance appraisals?

“They don’t get the training, they don’t feel confident, and often it’s done in a rush because they don’t like doing it and they put it off and then crappy HR comes in and says you must do the performance appraisals, they’re due,” Harrison says.