Headache of Annual Appraisal

At end of each year, many of us, whether you are from HR department or just one of the many employees in the organization, will face the headache of completing performance review or appraisal with your boss or suboridante. When talking about appraisal, one may think about:

  1. A waste of time - a ritual only
  2. Hypocrite
  3. Not fair to hard-working people who know little about flattery

However, there should be something we can do so that performance review can be a more constructive and effective process.

Problem of "Annual" Appraisal

First of all, with the help of automated HR software, we suggest not to wait for a year before performing appraisal. Imagine that as a customers, or your family members, does it make sense to check out each other only once a year? Honestly, it is tough task to remember what one has done and performed throughout the year, and more likely, one can only remember what happen, for example, in the most recent weeks or month.

This is the so-called "Recency Bias". For example:

  1. Do you remember, in the past year, tasks that you have to complete by working over-time for two consecutive days?
  2. For each project in the past year, what suggestions have you made?

If all these are forgotten, what can we rely on to complete an annual performance review? Performance Review should not be an annual exercise similar to parents' day in school. Instead, think about how frequent you should meet with your closest partners.

  1. The business environment and customers' need change everyday. Employees' objectives should be updated regularly through frequent review to keep up with corporate objectives.

  2. With respect to staff members who proactively contribute to the company, we need to praize and reward their behaviour immediately. Otherwise, they may perceive that such behaviour is not treasured or recongized by the company, and therefore such behaviour cannot maintain.

  3. At the same time, for employees that fails to meet standard, performance improvment plan should also be worked out on a timely manner to intervene sub-standard behaviour.

  4. More frequent appraisal means taking less effort for ice-breaking before appraisal can begin?

  5. If you meet someone once a year only, the truth is others will not believe that you treat them as important working partners.

Simply choosing an automated HR system that support performance review, we can easily and more frequently appraise staff members, provide timely feedback and adjust objectives accordintly.


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E-Appraisal is a latest automated performance review system. E-Appraisal starts with aligning company's, team's and employees' goals, then tracks progress of each individual's appraisal result and visualizes various statistics to enable efficient allocation of human resources. It also spares us from bothering with Excel and paper shuffle.