Performance Management Process "PMP"

Last year same time I wrote a blog on the “Appraisal Time” and what all you need to do at the time of evaluation… but in a span of my career across various organizations I’ve noticed that this appraisal time is the bitter pill for most of the employees as they get disappointed after their performance evaluation [For me too :-) …] but as I mentioned in my earlier blog; you really don't need to worry much about Appraisal and Year End Hike because if you are Best at your things you'll surely get rewarded…

Now it’s time to put little more sun shine on so called “Performance Management Process”… I have been observing that maximum numbers of employees are never satisfied with their ratings… Few of them say it’s pre-decided by the employer itself (based on budget constraints, Favouritism, bell curve, etc..) so employer tries to put maximum number of workforce on an average stack… and you’ll get what the company decided not what you deserved… and as “so called” 360-feedback models when you approach seniors you’ll get compared with other employees of different background with different scope of work, because the senior you approach is hardly bothered what your scope of work actually is…

So as a result of above - Clash starts between employee and employer.

1. Human tendency being, if you’re not getting what you deserve then negativity arises.
2. The passion with which an employee does his/her work starts declining.
3. Interest in the employer is Lost.

And finally a situation comes when this viscous circle ends – Employee resigns; Work gets hamper and company loses a talent in its so called “Performance Management Process” …

Don’t you think there is a need to change this Process?

The change should be like - Focus on the employee in his or her own role. They should not try to rank employees against one another or compare performance to other employees of various domains.

Feedback should be more often, rather being a single review at the end of the year. The new system should tend to provide feedback more often like at the end of each major project or every quarter.

Move from focusing on the past to focusing on the future. Rather than reviewing an entire year’s performance at one go, these shorter, more frequent reviews will help employees to get timely reviews from their manager and have enough time to improve before the final review as compared to traditional method where there is no scope left other than looking back on past accomplishments or failures and getting disappointed.

Now let’s consider another aspect of the traditional review system. The reviewer has a set of values against which an employee is reviewed and these values often are minimally related to his scope of work making the whole review process worthless.

Shifting the focus from so called “Performance Management Process” to fueling employee performance is the need of time now. More frequent check-ins and reviews mean that a manager has more opportunities to steer an employee towards his or her best performance.

I feel this approach stands out as being more effective at actually generating higher employee performance because employee are no longer dwelled on what happened in the past, but instead focusing on how to improve in the future.

In my opinion each and every employee should be consider as an asset to Organization thus the reviews should be designed accordingly, this will definitely lead to content and happy work force.