Whenever you are working towards any defined objective, whether it’s in business or your personal life, checking your performance along the way is a necessary process. When it comes to judging the performance of your employees in your organization, the best way to do so is to create performance appraisal goals.
The performance appraisal method allows managers to set up a clearly defined and transparent system of feedback and for employees to improve their performance. However, many managers and employees shy away from using the system. As they believe that the goal-setting process is ineffective.
What people don’t realize is that it is not the goal-setting process that can cause friction, but how the goals are set and the intent behind them.
Create Performance Appraisal Goals
Using appraisal objectives to measure and evaluate the performance of employees across the organization is an essential part of measuring the performance of your organization as a whole. In addition, when you create performance appraisal goals, it allows you to identify key areas where performance can be improved. While providing the same information clearly and concisely to your employees.
A performance appraisal system goes beyond just setting up appraisal objectives. So goal setting is the first and perhaps one of the most crucial parts of the process.
The issue with performance appraisal goals
One of the major gripes that most professionals have with a system like this is that they have too many things to manage. That is to say, they have been assigned too many goals. Goals that can essentially pigeonhole professionals into working one particular way.
This style of goal setting where every task is being micromanaged will not be effective for the employee. Moreover, it certainly won’t help any managers evaluate the performance of their workers either.
If employees have too many goals and appraisal objectives to worry about. It dilutes the value and importance of the appraisal system. Every worker should only have 3-5 goals to work on in any given period.
Goals should be assigned sparingly and with careful thought behind them. A goal should be something that an employee can work towards, not a how-to-manual of what the employee should be doing.
How to set up appraisal objectives
Goals that have been appropriately set can significantly impact your employees’ overall performance and how they strive to improve themselves. That’s why you should be setting up goals using the SMART model.
Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
- Specific: A specific goal means that you should clearly define your goal. Vague goals can cause undue confusion in your employees. They can also cause your employees to simply not understand what you want them to do.
- Measurable: If a goal has been set for performance evaluation, it should be a goal that your organization can measure. Setting up a goal that can’t be measured or is intangible means that it is worthless for monitoring an employee’s performance. For qualitative goals, assign measures of quality so that it can be compared.
- Attainable: According to research, we perform the best and learn the most when we are challenged. The difficulty of the challenge has to be just right. It must challenge the employee, but should not be unattainable. Set a goal that your employees can realistically achieve with some improvement or hard work.
- Relevant: A goal should be relevant to the responsibilities of each employee. An accountant working for good businesses or startups shouldn’t have an appraisal objective of increasing his production capacity by 20%, for example. Keep each goal relevant to the job profile of each employee.
- Timely: Each goal should have a specific time frame to be attained. Even if the goal is not met, you can see the progress made towards that goal in your set time frame. Timely goals also impose a sense of responsibility and urgency.
Importance of feedback
After you have set up the proper goals, don’t forget the importance of feedback. By providing feedback to your employees, you constantly update your employees regarding their progress towards their goals.
Also, it will help you to recognize those employees who are succeeding with improved quality and work performance. Also, every employee loves to be recognized for their hard work, after all.
Perhaps more importantly, it will also help you identify and advise employees who are performing poorly. Furthermore, most employees who perform poorly either do not know that they are performing poorly or do not know why they are performing poorly. Proper constructive feedback will allow you to unlock the potential of these employees as well.