Staff appraisals frustrate both their writers and subjects for many reasons. Among them is the feeling that with sections like Areas of Strengths, Areas for Improvement, and Action Plan, performance appraisals force a potentially false narrative in which obvious strengths and irrelevant faults are revealed, and useless improvements are sought. Writers lament that appraisals are repetitive, time-consuming, repetitive, and insincere; readers complain that appraisals accentuate the negative, fail to describe the real them, and breed resentment. Those are quite a few obstacles to overcome.
Yet you can contend with these hurdles by employing these five steps.
1. Look to the organizational mission and core values. Start the appraisal process by connecting the desired objectives and skills to the corporate mission statement and core values. You'll get a lot of support there. For example, Apple mentions its mission as "to bring the best personal computing products and support to students, educators, designers, scientists, engineers, businesspersons, and consumers in over 140 countries around the world," and some of its core values as innovation, uniqueness, significance, simplicity, collaboration, and excellence. Building from the mission statement, those values should be at the heart of every listed skill, performance level, and evaluative measurement in the appraisal template. If they are not, rewrite the appraisal to reflect them.
2. Focus on the employee's development. The appraisal should exist for one reason only: to support employees in developing their skills. If the area of strength offers no clue to cultivating the employee's competence, exclude it from the report. Likewise, if the area for improvement does not tie into the mission and core values of the business, scratch it.
3. Seek multiple sources. To bring more validity and value to the appraisal, seek feedback about the employee from teammates, direct and indirect reports, managers, executives, interdepartmental staff, vendors, and internal and external customers. These parties may notice qualities and behaviors that you might disregard, devalue, or overlook, and they might provide deeper insights into the employee.
4. Integrate the skills. The appraiser should embed into the narrative the employee's areas of strength and improvement. The listed strength should enable the employee to overcome the weakness. The strengths should be maintainable, the weaknesses should be surmountable, and the goals should be attainable—all from the perspective of the clearly described skill.
5. Write plainly. This means ensuring the description represents the numerical assessment, if you're using one. Avoid hyperbolic words on the positive side (great, extraordinary, etc.) and the negative side (abysmal, appalling, etc.) Use the whole scale, not shying from the upmost or bottommost numerical value. This is why I prefer a simple scale of 1 to 3. But use the upmost score as a means of modeling excellent behavior and the bottommost as a means of developing, not destroying, the employee.
Other reports in this series are:
