Employee Performance Appraisal System: An Overview

By Author: Peter Rodriguez
Total Articles: 50
Comment this article

Professional career progression owes much to performance appraisal. Performance appraisal provides employees with feedback on their caliber and the contributions to their organizations. Managers, peers, subordinates, and customers measure employee performance and core values against a number of attributes or objectives by using scalar or numerical rating system. Performance ratings are given to an employee in terms of quality, quantity, time and cost.

In fact, employee performance measurement is a critical task based on review and calculations about the recent contributions of employees to their companies, their successes and failures, personal strengths and weaknesses and suitability for promotion or further training. Seniors officials, colleagues as well as company associates remain responsible to supervise and measure performances of employees. Even, employees are encouraged to self-assess their performances and this process is popularly known as 360-degree appraisal management system. A quality and scrupulous performance appraisal benefits both the company and its employees equally. Should both of them cooperate ...
... with each other in this; they will be able to promote mutual understanding of their individual needs, business goals and parameters of acceptable performance.

In contrast to these days, employee performance evaluation system had been manual previously. It has now become web-based allowing the involved parties to perform the assessment task faster and with ease. Also, the results the online system generates are seamless. With using this valuable system, human resource department of a company can make their decisions flawlessly about their employees in accordance with the feedback. There are several purposes and benefits that a user of a performance appraisal system can gain.

Common purposes of an appraisal system: An appraisal system generates feedback about employees of a user company. On the basis of feedback, HR department of that company can make right decision about the concerned employees. So, while different career factors of an employee depend upon the system-generated feedback, the user company should inform their employees why and how the system is going to be used, well in advance, so that employees should be aware of the pros and cons of evaluating performances that are weighed by the system.

• To provide suggestions or feedback about employee performance
• To point out factors that necessitate employee training
• To keep the employees informed about required parameters to win organizational rewards
• To help make decisions about salary progression, bonuses, promotions, etc. about employees
• To help the user company to diagnose faults, to amend them and to develop
• To bridge the gap, if any, between an employer and an employee
• To help employees to improve themselves through counseling, coaching and refreshment sessions
• To measure if the core values are being followed by the employees
• To identify if the employees are focused on the set behavioral parameters

The ultimate goal of using performance appraisal system is to move the business forward. So, if a user company can ensure evaluation of its customer service can help it to reach to its target, then it should consider using the system for the evaluation of all those employee performances associated with the customer service of the company. Upon the results as generated out of the system, the company can make decisions about the salary increment, promotions, or giving other benefits to the employees.

So, it is very crucial to decide who is to be evaluated, how they will be evaluated, and what strategic objectives are to be given importance. And, as per the outcome, a company should consider which kind of performance appraisal management system will be used for. They should go for one which suits them better. Here are a few examples of methods to evaluate performances.

Q. &.A Based Method: Senior officials are asked to answer for some typical questions about their junior colleagues. The answers are, however, purely subjective and evaluated by the system and feedbacks are generated accordingly.

Graphic Based Method: As per the increase and decrease of performances of employees, the graphic chart of the system goes up and down with definite differentiating marks and standards. This is a popular method for performance assessment.

Peer Vote Based Method: The peers are asked to vote for or against their colleagues asserting a statement or giving a point as to whether they are following performance benchmarks of the company, distinctively set for the employees.

Objective Based Method: With using an assessment system, a user company can closely monitor the performance of its employees, tied through the basic performance parameters to be followed by the employees. On retrieving the feedbacks, the management of the user company can make appropriate decisions regarding their employees.

If a company uses such system, it can either customize the application as per its necessities, or else can combine elements of all these methods to optimize the utilities of the system. However, whatever kind of HRMS tools is being used by a company, its employees should be made known about its way of performing so that they can in turn perform accordingly and meet the set benchmarks.

Paylite offers an ideal HR management software that is customizable as per the needs and goals of a company in relating to HR workflows. It is suitable for small and medium scale companies equally, when large corporate institutions can also get premium services.