What is a bigger problem: Managing employee appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?

December 24th, 2008 Gireesh Sharma Posted in Employee Appraisals, HR Technology, HRMS (HRIS), Human Resources, Performance Management |

While, I was organizing a software training workshop for a major Electric Power Distribution Corporation in New Delhi, I asked Vikram Singh, one of the participating Senior Managers, who has a team size of 150 employees for performance review, “What is the bigger problem when conducting employee appraisals: managing appraisals or writing accurate appraisals?“.

[Background: This 2,500 employee big company opted for EmpXtrack Performance Management System. Prior to using a web-based performance management system, they used paper based appraisal forms.]

“I have a team of 150 people to review, for me managing employee appraisals is a bigger problem. With an experience of 10 years, writing accurate appraisal is not so difficult. It may be difficult for younger managers but not for an experienced one.“, said Vikram. He continued, “For senior managers like me who also have to review appraisal of my juniors’ teams (I have 8 juniors managing teams of 15-20 each), managing appraisals is a far bigger problem. There is already a long list of urgent tasks with me and then managing 150 employee appraisals, usually in a span of 1 month. It makes me sweat.”

After a couple of weeks, I revisited the company and saw Vikram in his cabin.

“After learning the functions of your new employee appraisal software, what do you think is its best feature.”, I inquired Vikram.

“Apart from usability, I find the E-mail reminders are cool. How convenient it is to get an e-mail when somebody completes an appraisal and send to me or get a reminder when an appraisal is overdue. Earlier I used to get stinkers from HR for not completing appraisals on time. Initially, I was scared with the large number of emails sent to my Inbox. Now, I have set e-mail filters in my email program and all appraisal messages are stored in a separate folder thus keeping my Inbox clean. Each email has a link to open employee’s appraisal directly. Fill it and forget it!”, Vikram chuckled and happily show me his email box and explained how setting filters made his work so easy.

It made me realize how important E-mail reminders functions was for senior managers especially those who have a long list as reviewers. And using filters on reminders makes it quite convenient to handle appraisals of even large teams. I am going to include it in my trainings…