appraisal headache image

We recently conducted a survey asking HR to describe their biggest performance management headaches. The moment we posted the question, the answers just came flooding in. This was not surprise to us for a couple of reasons:

  1. 2 $100 Spa Gift Cards were up for grabs.
  2. A lot of companies are still relying on legacy processes for conducting performance reviews. With that comes a complete set of pains and headaches that HR has to inevitably deal with.

So we were happy to give HR an outlet for this frustration and I would like to thank everyone who participated and submitted their great stories and pains with us.

Before we share the results, join me in congratulating our winners who get to make use of some cold hard Spa-dollars to help melt away appraisal woes.

Lillia Wild – Embrace Home Loans  & Loren Hughes – ANDRES Construction Services

As we sorted through all of the submissions, some very clear trends emerged. This was interesting because in the 10+ years emPerform has been helping organizations tackle their performance challenges, these headaches have remained relatively consistent. We also noticed that almost all submissions ended in a big exclamation mark (or 4) !!!– proving that HR faces more than just minor frustrations with these common challenges.

Top 5 Performance Management Headaches – submitted by you!

  1. Timely submissions of appraisals.
  2. Quality of reviews & feedback.
  3. Consistency in performance ratings.
  4. Alignment of organizational & team goals with employee performance.

The last couple of years; however, we have noticed an even bigger challenge emerging and this was supported by the nearly 40% of submissions that alluded to it in some form or another. It has to do with the pain of taking performance reviews from a once-a-year event, to an ongoing, meaningful process.

5. Engaging managers & employees in ongoing performance management

Luckily, there are ways to address each of these headaches and we will tackle each of these pains in the coming weeks with dedicated posts: stay tuned for those!

 

Some appraisal headache submissions we received:

“Ensuring that everyone participates and completes the process in a timely manner.”

“Timely submissions as well as inflated ratings are my biggest appraisal headaches!”

“Having employees and supervisors meeting the deadlines!”

“Getting managers and supervisors to rate employees fairly across the board.”

“Trying to ensure employees are all spending their time working towards common objectives.”

“Convincing managers that this could be so much easier, and actually beneficial for everyone, if they would just talk to their people throughout the year, deal with problems then, rather than storing everything up for the year-end review!”

“Getting supervisors to give feedback – good and bad!”

“Managers forgetting what took place during the year so they rate all employees the same.”

“Inconsistency of reviews across the organization and how that affects employees.”

 

Looking to take a permanent vacation from performance management headaches?
Explore emPerform’s award-winning software suite for automating & streamlining performance reviews & other vital talent management processes.