Appraising employee performance is essential towards building productivity level but it’s always coming with shortfalls difficult to lay hands on. Most of these shortfalls emanate from the overall employee appraisal system, while others are because of the one-on-one employee appraisal system. Either way, it’s easy to make mistakes when managers are conducting performance appraisals.

Managers and employees alike are usually faced with these four pitfalls while conducting performance appraisal.

Carrying out performance appraisals on an annual basis

It will be interesting to note that employees require regular feedback on their performance more frequently than on yearly basis. In their endeavor to be a better employee, they need to always know where their input and output needs to be improved upon, hence the need for their performance appraisal to come up more frequently than an annual basis. Work goals are subject to regular transformation and in order to adjust and set goals to suit the change, regular update on performance should be made available, hence the employee performance appraisal needs to constantly be carried out.

Making performance appraisal appear as a Lecture

Managers fail to make performance appraisal to be conversational, they bore employees with long lectures about performance. No employee is ready to listen to a lecture, however long or short when expecting an interaction from the management. In a lecture styled performance appraisal exercise a manager gets the employee turned off once the employee has been told about the grey areas of his or her work, no other positive part of the appraisal is taken into cognizance by the same employee. It is rather better to have the employee run a personal performance assessment and set a personalized goal for improvement.

Performance Appraisal and Employee Development

Emphasis is rarely laid on employee skill and abilities development during performance appraisals. The main reason to carry out a performance appraisal on employees is to deduce areas in their performance that require improvement and development. Work on those areas calling for improvement by developing the employees to grow their skills and abilities and equally contribute to the organization’s growth and success.

Performance Appraisals and Pay

Employers due to fear of financial burden the performance appraisal will bring in the area of pay rises and rewards tend to downplay performance appraisal exercises. This negatively affects the employee’s chances of growth and development. This has a future negative effect on the overall performance of the organization as employees in a bid to scale through positively in performance appraisal exercises will conceal lots of faults and problems, and offer cosmetic input of labor/skills.

If you’re to discuss terms of pay rise with your employees, you must let them know that it will be based on other various factors and annually remind them of how you will make your decisions about pay rises. Performance appraisal should not be a yardstick to determine wage rise, it will make a mess of the core reason why performance appraisal is required in an organization which is simply to deduce areas with a need for improvement and development, helping the employees develop and grow their skills and abilities.

A better maneuvering of these four factors sets you and your organization towards the part of greatness by continuous improvement of your workforce and strategies.

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