5 Tips to Prepare Your Managers for Appraisal ‘Season’
Appraisal processes often coincide with the end of the corporate year, when the business results are published. Since business years tend to coincide with the calendar year or the tax year, (ending April in the UK), the appraisal season usually runs from around October until April.
Obviously, some of you will have your appraisals outside of this time, particularly as businesses move away from an annual appraisal process to a quarterly or even monthly appraisal process.
Irrespective of when your appraisal season starts here are 5 quick and essential tips to help you prepare your managers for the appraisal season.
1.Create A Schedule: Whether your appraisals are annual or quarterly, develop a schedule and timeline and communicate this to all parties well in advance. The time-line should include an appraisal submission deadline, appraisal meeting date and a completed appraisal form submission deadline. This will help your appraisal process run more smoothly. With one of my clients, where we do quarterly appraisals, we plan out meeting days and dates one year in advance and it enables smooth running of the process.
2.Train Managers on the process. Managers will be important levers in the process and motivated and informed line managers will help drive and steer the overall appraisal process. Managers who only do this once a year will be ring rusty and will have forgotten the process and so send them a short 5 minute refresher article outlining the process.
3.Train Employees on the process. Employees will often be required to self evaluate and so the appraisal process will be dependent on them submitting their completed self-appraisal data in a timely manner. So, ensure the key information deadlines are communicated to employees to and they may also benefit from a short training refresher on the subject.
4.Use Specialist Employee Performance Appraisal Software. Employee appraisals can be a laborious process but you can remove much of the manual labour and administrative over head by using appraisal software. Good appraisal software will have time-saving functionality such as automated email prompts, notification and reminders about all the key deadlines, meaning HR and managers won’t need to chase staff. Staff and managers can simply enter their data into an online system and view historical data without requiring intervention form HR or line managers. You can find a list of free or affordable performance appraisal systems here.
5.Educate staff on SMART goal setting. Best Practice dictates that for an appraisal process to be effective at driving performance it should contain SMART goals (SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE ATTAINABLE, REALISTIC AND TIME BOUNDED). Even so, many organizations find that their performance goals are not that SMART. Provide staff and managers with a training refresher (a short 5 minute article will suffice) on SMART goal setting.
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