Recently, numerous articles and blog posts have criticized the annual performance appraisal process, saying that it fails to meet employees' most basic needs for receiving feedback, coaching and recognition.
In reality, the problem is not so much with the performance appraisal process itself, as it is with our use of it. Current wisdom states that employee performance management is a year round activity, not a once a year activity. Today's automated talent management applications provide managers and employees with all the tools they need to effectively manage performance year round.
Regularly Keep Notes in a Performance Journal
Unless you've kept detailed notes throughout the year, writing employee performance reviews at the end of the year tends to result in skewed evaluations. While we easily remember what happened in the last quarter, we tend to forget the details of what went on earlier.
The easiest solution is to keep a record of employee performance year round. Both managers and employees should jot down notes on milestones, accomplishments, successes and challenges as they occur, when the details are fresh in your mind. If you believe there's an opportunity for coaching or training, make note of that too. And if you take any immediate action to reward or remedy a behavior, it's important to keep a record of it. All of these details help a manager to provide their employee with detailed feedback, rich with real examples.
Keeping a journal also helps managers to monitor their own behavior and see where there might be opportunities to improve their own management skills. And it helps employees to make their contributions and perspective more visible to their manager.
Where appropriate, it might be useful for a manager and employee to share their notes. It can help them to come to a common understanding of a situation, or at least identify a disconnect in their perceptions.
Keeping a performance journal for each employee on paper would be an arduous task. Fortunately, today's automated talent management applications typically provide managers and employees with a convenient online journal, where they can record performance details with ease, and store them in a central location for easy retrieval.
Monitor Progress on Goals
Employee goals should never be established and then put away, only to be looked at in the few weeks before an employee review meeting. At your annual employee performance review meeting, it's too late to take corrective action to ensure goals are met or to adjust goals that are no longer SMART. In today's rapid business environment, it's critical to stay on top of the status and ongoing value/appropriateness of goals at all level of the organization.
Trying to do this with paper is impossible. An online talent management application makes it easy for everyone to regularly update the status of their goals. Managers and executives can see the status of all linked goals, and update/communicate the status of higher-level organizational goals to everyone involved. This is an easy way to ensure ongoing communication and alignment, and keep everyone on track.
Provide Ongoing Coaching and Development Activities
In some organizations, employee development is only dealt with during the annual employee performance review. Development needs are identified based on performance ratings and "stretch" goals, then a few courses or learning activities are assigned.
A better way to ensure continuous growth and improvement is to provide ongoing coaching and assign development activities as needs arise. We never know when we are going to reach the limit of our knowledge, skills and abilities.
Automated talent management systems can help in a few ways. First, if performance is being tracked year round in performance journals and with goal status updates, challenges can be identified and addressed much sooner. Second, if your system provides tight integration between your performance management and learning management functions, it can put coaching tips and your learning catalog at managers' and employees' fingertips. Having easy access to the tools they need to effectively coach and develop their employees makes managers much more likely to do so.
Send Email Reminders to Keep the Process Top of Mind
In order to make performance management a year round activity and part of your organizational culture, you need to communicate its importance to your staff. In the early days, it is vital to continually remind people to make notes on their performance, and update the progress/status of their goals and development activities.
Keeping track of everyone's participation can be difficult, unless you have an automated talent management system that keeps track of everything for you. It can easily be configured to send automated email messages to remind people of performance management tasks, but also to make journal notes or update the progress/status of their goals.
Hold More Frequent Review Meetings
If you only conduct performance review meetings once a year, chances are you're not encouraging ongoing dialogue and feedback between managers and employees. Many organizations find it useful to hold one annual performance review meeting where an employee's performance for the year is summarized and rated, but also quarterly or even monthly reviews to encourage and formalize the dialogue and feedback process. More frequent review meetings have the benefit of dealing with "fresher" information. They also allow a manager and employee to deal with a performance issue early on, before it becomes a major stumbling block.
Managers and employees will balk at the additional review meetings only if you overload them with paperwork and process. The goal of the quarterly or monthly meetings should be to provide the employee with feedback, to check in on goals to ensure they are still relevant and appropriate and that progress is being made, and to identify any development requirements. This doesn't need a lot of paperwork or approvals.
If you have an automated talent management process, it's easy to include quarterly or monthly "mini review" meetings in your process to encourage ongoing dialogue.
Learn How Halogen Software Customers Are Making Performance Management an Ongoing Practice
PointRoll's talent management system helps to keep its investment in people at the forefront, even during the busiest business cycles. For their mostly Gen Y workforce, getting clear ongoing feedback on performance and having clear goals to work towards are key to employee satisfaction.
By automating their talent management process, McStain Neighborhoods has realized better goal alignment and stronger commitment by all to achieving corporate goals. In addition, by reducing the administrative burden, they've allowed managers and employees to focus more on ongoing performance management and employee development.
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