What To Do About Performance Appraisals During the Pandemic?
Stop them? Lighten them? Modify the Goals? Make them more accessible?
The coronavirus pandemic has turned the business world on it’s head. Remote working and virtual collaboration have temporarily replaced the face-to-face operational norm. It may take a year or two to re-establish the new remote vs office working normal. In the meantime, what should be done about performance appraisals during the pandemic? Here’s our view.
Abandon appraisals?
This would be the worst possible time to abandon performance appraisals, because they are exactly what companies need to track situation-critical performance factors relating to agility, adaptability, flexibility, resilience and effectiveness.
But, the heavy, traditional, annual appraisal format should be abandoned, as it will hinder them in the current climate, either by instantly overloading already stretched employees, or failing to provide the situation-critical stimulus to performance, if done in 6 months time. More frequent but lighter touch appraisals should be deployed.
Make them more frequent and lighten them
However, while the current situation demands more frequent performance appraisals, you don’t want to overload staff. So, with the increase in frequency of appraisals there must be a significant lightening of the administrative load. This can done using automating technologies, (which have been a big winner during this pandemic where human labour has been compromised). It’s no different with performance management.
By, switching to an appraisal process driven by performance appraisal software, like AssessTEAM which specialises in automation and continuous appraisals you can effectively drive situation-critical behaviours that ensure business continuity during the pandemic. Automated continuous appraisals tools like AssessTEAM have several features that enable you to implement and agile performance appraisal process in your organizations and these are:
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Library of over 3000 goals and 40,000 KPIs for fast manual goal setting
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Ability to auto-assign goals to employees based on their job description
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Automated 360 degree appraisals can be scheduled at your desired frequency, (weekly monthly, quarterly)
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System will automatically chase raters to complete evaluations at desired frequency.
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Evaluations are remote-accessible via cloud or the web
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Employees evaluation app gives employees situation-critical access to goals, performance reports and time-sheets.
By using an automated, agile performance appraisals tool like AssessTEAM you can do frequent, situation-critical appraisals with minimal management overhead. In short, you can do more frequent appraisals while lightening the overall management load.
Modify the goals
While performance management should be business usual during the pandemic, certain elements must change. For example, it’s highly likely that business-as-usual priorities will change during the pandemic, being replaced by situation-critical projects, such as digital transformation, health and safety, process re-engineering, cost-saving etc…. You may be introducing external business transformation consultants like Cavendish Wood, to help shape and accelerate internal process transformation. With all this change you’ll also need to be assigning more goals than usual relating to adaptability, flexibility, commercial/situational awareness and perhaps resilience. To focus employees and consultants on these activities in the most optimal way it’s vital therefore that goals are modified. Again, this is easy using an augmented appraisal system like AssessTEAM as you can quickly assign new goals from their inbuilt library containing literally thousands of goals.
Make them more accessible
Since employees are working remotely, they can’t access office files or paperwork like they used to, so your entire end-to-end appraisal process need to go online quickly to make it more accessible. Modern appraisals systems such as AssessTEAM can be fully accessed and operated by a computer with a web connection and browser. For maximum accessibility, choose a performance management software tool that has a well-developed, fully integrated mobile performance management app too.
Given the situation-critical nature of the pandemic organizations should not only keep doing appraisals, but they should be done more frequently and in more responsive way, using agile 360 degree performance appraisal tools like AssessTEAM, in order to drive and focus employee behaviour in the right areas throughout the crisis and beyond.
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