Offer 1 Substantive comment on two of the students post
Please read posts of the two classmates. Offer at least one SUBSTANTIVE comment. Substantive agrees with supporting facts, disagrees with supporting facts, adds to the conversation with some new idea.
Student 1 Haley
According to Forbes, annual performance appraisals have started to recently get ditched by some major companies such as Motorola, Microsoft, Deloitte and GE. This is because these performance appraisals are too time consuming, do not significantly impact employee performance, and they bring down morale. Instead of doing yearly performance reviews, they are electing to do more frequent one on one meetings with managers. They believe this will still provide the necessary feedback, but also help keep employees on task. Some ways they proposed to fix the issues companies are having with performance appraisals is by having more frequent meetings, training managers how to evaluate fairly, and having employees set goals that are measurable.
Personally I believe there is little value to these performance appraisals. There is a lack of consistency in the way employees are reviewed and evaluated by their managers. There is room for unconscious bias, which could hurt the employees morale, not allow them to get a bonus, and could even cause them to lose their job. Also, what some customers are evaluated on are not measurable, giving way to more inconsistency and sometimes bias. For example, some companies measure customer service or communication skills. Lastly, some companies use these reviews to weed out the low performers. This is not an accurate way of evaluating who should or should not stay with the company since these reviews are not standardized and have many inconsistencies. Overall, I believe performance reviews are too inconsistent to be a reliable way to evaluate employees.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcesc…
Student 2 Jeanie
My experience with annual performance appraisals is they can have good and negative aspects to them. If you have a manager that gives solid and objective feedback to an employee it can be an asset if the employee is open to hearing and accepting the feedback. In my career I have always been one that likes feedback and understand that high level managers do not always have the time, so the once a year sit down was always welcome to me. Others find the process bothersome and don’t spend any time to find if there are areas for improvement in their daily work. Over the years and especially the last few years there has been more and more discussion on how to move past the annual appraisal. One of the problems I see is the mixture of managers that are actually performing these tasks. The baby boomers tend to want to document and have critical conversations and the younger generation would like to use a “tool” that will help to speed the process and can be very assertive in providing feedback to employees.
I have found that once we get managers working in the same format of the annual performance appraisal we have another challenge of how they provide feedback. Some managers provide critical feedback and meaningful objectives while other managers will provide soft feedback because they don’t want to be the “bad guy” and give the employee information on areas of improvement. This can lead to an employee feeling they are doing a good job when in fact they need significant improvement or they may be listed as a poor performer that needs to be replaced. Just educating managers on how to provide the critical feedback is a step in the right direction but the company needs to have a good understand on the strength of the manager to do this appropriately.
In summary I do believe in annual performance appraisals but also think that managers need to be connecting on a regular basis to provide feedback. An employee should not find out once a year that they are performing or not. In looking for articles to reference I found this one on training the Manager to maximize the process. There can be a significantly important information gathered from the process that not only assists the manager with their team but also higher levels of manager to identify employees that may be a future successor to manager or an issue that an employee needs to be moved to another area. Training is another critical factor that can be pulled from the annual review that may otherwise be overlooked.
