In the current climate of business, there is less and less time for people to talk to each other about each other. More and more time is spent dealing with customers and products and meetings. There is a great need to hold on to these valuable face-to-face opportunities. Performance appraisals offer a way to protect and manage and nurture these situations.

Generally, the aims of a scheme are:

Give feedback to employees to improve subsequent performance.

Identify employee training needs.

Document criteria used to allocate organisational rewards.

Form a basis for -salary or bonus increases,

Provide the opportunity for development.

Assist communication between employee and line- manager.

Endorse and confirm in writing, selection techniques and human resource policies to meet Equal Employment Opportunity requirements.

When designing or planning and conducting appraisals, the person conducting it should not just seek to identify obviously relevant work skills training, they should seek to help the person as a whole to develop and they should be given an opportunity to have an involvement and choice in that development. Increasingly, best practice amongst employers involves developing all aspects of an employee which in turn encourages positive attitudes, progression, motivation, and also develops lots of new skills and enthusiasm that can be relevant to working productively and effectively in any sort of organisation.

Developing an employee is also an important aspect of modern human resources responsibility, and additionally, good human resource methods are a crucial advantage in the employment market, in which all employers compete to attract the best recruits, and to retain the best staff.

Performance appraisals must be positive experiences. The appraisals process provides the underpinning foundation for development and motivation, so organisations should promote a feeling that performance appraisals are positive things, in order to get the best out of the people and the process. If appraisals are not advocated correctly, they can be widely regarded as something rather less welcoming, which provides a basis only on which to develop fear and resentment, and so a staff performance appraisal should never be used to handle matters of discipline or reprimand These should be handled separately in specially arranged meetings.

Appraisals must not discriminate against anyone because they are a lawful basis for assessing and managing people. It is particularly important, therefore, to avoid any comments, judgments, suggestions, questions or decisions which might be perceived by the employee to be based on age, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion or disability.

360 degree appraisals are a powerful developmental method and quite different to traditional manager- to - employee appraisals. The 360 degree process does not replace the traditional one-to-one process - it enhances it, but also can be used as a stand-alone development method.

360 degree appraisals involve the person being appraised receiving feedback from people (named or anonymous) whose views are relevant. The feedback is typically provided on an evaluation form showing job skills/ attitude and behavioral criteria with some form of scoring system. The person being appraised should also assess themselves form.

Persons completing 360 degree evaluations can be the person’s peers, managers, underlings, team members, other staff, customers, suppliers - anyone who comes into contact with them and has valid opinions or views of them.

At TrainingTeams Ltd, we provide advice on the preparation and running of performance appraisals to middle management and Director level. We can also feed positive links into other training of employees to encourage them to ‘buy in’ to anew or existing appraisal system.

At supervisor level, we also recommend that we interact this course with the ‘Feedback’ training course that we provide.