5 Reasons for Making Performance Appraisals Your Top HR Activity

Performance Appraisals

Every company worth its name conducts regular performance appraisals of its employees. Performance appraisals are an important part of corporate culture and instil a sense of accountability, recognition, and discipline. This fundamental practice encourages collaboration between employees and employers and helps employees to progress towards personal and professional success. All this helps the company, in general, to be more efficient, by regularly providing feedback to employees and correcting them when they are going wrong.

Positive and Negative Appraisals:

When employees receive positive appraisals, it acts as positive reinforcement. It helps employees to strive better and work harder to achieve more recognition from the upper management. On the other hand, negative appraisal acts as a deterrent or negative reinforcement, which helps to curb unwanted behaviours and inefficiency. In general, it promotes a sense of excellence and professionalism within an organization.

Let us take a look at 5 reasons why performance appraisals are important.

• Helps to Form Compensation Guidelines – 

When employees outperform or fare better than the norms, they need to be compensated for that. Such positive reinforcement helps employees to maintain their performance or even improve from where they already are. An HRMS tool makes this automatic. A manager will not need to individually see who is performing better and who should be compensated more. This part of performance appraisal can be automated, much to the relief of both managers and employees.

• Tracking Weaknesses and Strengths – 

Every employee has his or her weaknesses and strengths. A performance appraisal should describe each employee’s weaknesses and strengths. They should be encouraged to hone their strengths and work on their weaknesses. Instead of an HR manager having to do all this, an HRMS tool can automate this. It can continuously and efficiently track the performance of an employee and assess what his or her weaknesses and strengths are. This helps to make performance appraisals more objective, transparent and fair.

• Whom to Promote?

A performance appraisal eventually helps managers to decide whom to promote to the next level. While there is always a scope for favouritism and other malpractices, HRMS ensures that performance appraisals are completely objective. This ensures that only the most deserving employee gets promoted, instead of someone who is secretly friendly with the manager responsible for promotions.

• Performance Appraisals are Great Feedback – 

When an employee receives performance appraisals, he or she essentially receives a feedback regarding their work performance. While managers can always give feedback to employees, an HRMS tool ensures that there is continuous and objective feedback given to employees at regular intervals. This automation of feedback process helps employees to always remain on the edge and work better.

• Train the Employees – 

Performance appraisals, as mentioned earlier, help to assess employees’ strengths and weaknesses. When employees are weak at something, an HRMS can direct them to automated learning and training programs, which are also embedded within the HRMS. Such automation will save the employees from unnecessary embarrassment and help them to train themselves without having to talk to managers. Moreover, it reduces the cost of hiring real trainers or program coordinators.

Final Thoughts:

An HRMS is a great tool to facilitate performance appraisal. A performance appraisal in itself is an important way to improve professionalism within an organization. By adopting automated performance appraisals, we can avoid all the subjectivity, biases and prejudices often encountered at workplaces. It is always prudent to incorporate regular performance appraisals of employees.
If a company chooses to use HRMS to conduct performance appraisals, the objectivity of the exercise will only increase. An objective and fair performance appraisal that is delivered at regular intervals will help to boost employees’ morale and improve productivity in the long term. Wants to know more about exactllyHRMS? Feel free to Contact Us and get a Free Demo.