• Remember that the best way to inspire your employees to perform better is to attest your support and trust to them.
  • If the system for performance appraisal is constructive, it is an instrument for developing and motivating your personnel, improving quality standards and productiveness, keeping up the focus on organizational purposes.
  • Everyday managing performance can be carried out in several stages – first plan what is necessary to be done(the employee should be involved in order to feel more engaged to the company), specify expectations; follow and periodically evaluate performance appraisal; develop your employee’s abilities with trainings, challenging assignments, opportunities for career development;  remunerate good performance in order to stimulate improvements.
  • You can establish labour performance in different ways. The manager is the one to define goals, and the employee agrees to be evaluated according to their achievement. When appraising on a scale, the employee receives evaluation from “poor” to “excellent” and criteria are differently fixed for each position. Another method is when the manager makes a written appraisal about the labour performance of the employee. In order to be as objective in appraising as possible you can use the 360 degree feedback system.
  • Defining goals is of utmost importance for the organization as a whole – they create frames and clear out expectations from every participant. That is why it is very important to set goals together with your team. It is a good idea that they correspond to the SMART requirements – to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and engaged with time.
  • Through performance appraisal you can identify the “stars” in your team. If you make a connection between performance appraisal and remuneration system, you should be careful not to forget the other about 80 percents that may not be stars but also play a crucial role for the success of the organization. They also need motivation and a chance for development.
  • The feedback has a key role for the performance appraisal. It should be concrete, descriptive (not judging), directed to certain activities not to the person himself and constructive.
  • It is very important to set an attitude to the performance appraisal as a chance to develop in order not to provoke negative emotions and to make participants as frank as possible.
  • The performance appraisal motivates a possible promotion of a given employee. Promotion does not mean only change of position and climbing up the hierarchy but also much more responsibilities. Therefore you should be very careful when you choose the person who is going to be promoted. A suitable moment for this is when you finish the year appraisals of you employees. Remember that good individual results are not a sufficient motif for an employee to be promoted, because he must be a leader, to be able to work in team, to achieve results, to be good at delegating, to help his team develop instead of feeling unique in the limelight. That is why “stars” are not a good choice for promoting.
  • When you are taking a decision about a promotion you can turn to your personnel and ask them to vote secretly who they recommend. After defining the person and personally talking to him/her you should speak in front of the rest of the personnel and explain the motifs for your decision.
  • Performance appraisal suggests that in addition to defining stars and people for promotion you will also have to pay some attention to those who are not carrying off that well. This is probably a small percent of your employees – those who are making few efforts, who are working in a slip-shod way, who are not satisfying your expectations or causing problems. When you are going to fire someone, you’d better talk to him in private and give reasons for your decisions. Think of the consequences – who would take the function of the fired one, how would the employee accept it (for example for a young person it would be very difficult if this is his first job).
  • You need to appraise performance of both individual and team. Appraising team performance is more difficult. When you are building a team, you gather many people with different qualities, strong and weak points, style of work. In a perfect case these people complement one another and work effectively together. If you want to manage your team successfully and to appraise their performance, first agree on work standards and goals. As a manager of your team you should explain to your personnel what mission they have as a team, in what way you expect them to achieve it, what challenges they might meet and how their success will be measured.
  • When your team does not satisfy your expectations you should identify the problem – whether the reason is in the managing style, focus, aims, skills or team work.  If you have to fire a team of your member, this will certainly affect the team dynamics. This will happen when you promote someone, too. In both cases it is of utmost importance to give reasons for your decision.
  • Most experts agree that a successful appraisal performance system includes four components – concrete and clear organizational definition for labour performance, program for training and development that is focused on development of the performance, objective system for appraising and method for recognition and remuneration.
  • There are different possible approaches to the system of performance appraisal. Individual evaluation suggests individual performance of the employee. On the other hand team evaluation suggests performance of the employee in connection with other members of the team – team members separate into couples and compare. The third approach is comparison of the employee on a scale together with all the others working in the organization – those who perform well are about 10 %, those who are at a middle level are about 80%, those who perform badly are about 10%, too.
  • You can measure the efficiency of the system for performance appraisal through the change of ratings, percent of vacant positions, filled positions from the inside, average rating of a business unit, percent of improvement in employee’s satisfaction, keeping of employees etc.
  • In order to keep your appraisal performance system current and effective, study the improvements in retainment, productivity, employee’s competences and progress; periodically evaluate standards for labour performance and encourage your employees to share feedback. Thus you will succeed in motivating them, too.