- December 24, 2009
- Posted by: admin
- Categories: Blog, Enterprise Agility, Human Resource Management, Requirement Analysis
Employee evaluation is considered vital for every organization since it’s an important HR function. A comprehensive assessment of employee’s performance benefits a company in many ways. It’s a well-known method of evaluating employees’ strengths and weaknesses which further facilitates the management as it acts as a foundation on which they can work and improve the overall organizational performance. 
Normally the scenario is that the evaluation is done at the end of the fiscal year (just before the increment period) as per the company’s policy. However, some companies evaluate performances on a short term basis (bi annually/quarterly). It has its own advantages, the reason being, if the employees’ performance is not going in the desired direction, the management can correct them mid – way rather than waiting for the whole year to end and then making corrections.
Short term evaluation Vs Long term evaluation – which one in your opinion can contribute better, as far as the end – result is concerned. Furthermore, if there are any pros and cons associated with them then kindly highlight those aspects as well.
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Short term, project based feedback is ideal for skill development and reinforcement. Long term evaluation provides just that- long term exchange and career development focus. Both are equally important to maintain an active dialogue and keep employee and management focused and engaged. I’ve found it most effective to provide short term results based feedback on projects and periodic performance, and to provide a separate setting and process for long term career development and feedback. Both can be combined and balanced for ‘annual evaluation’ if desired. Ideally,a career development discussion should be led by teh employee; what does he/she want to develop, aspire to tackle? Managers can then provide feedback and highlight opportunities to support these goals as they align to business opportunity. Short term/periodic results should be discussed from the perspective of the manager and the specific objectives outlined for the project.
every minute is important in the competitive edge,if you are not able to read your employee credibility & capacity in the first interview means you will lose something in the future,short is the word which must be in the competitive edge.
with regards.
abhishek,
always look for the result oriented emplyee whether having degree or not it doesn’t matter.
Good Afternoon Salima,
Wishing you merry christmas and a very happy and prosperous new year.
Coming to the question, in my view both has its merits and demerits. While in the short term evaluation I feel it gives much more control to the employer to evaluate and judge the performances and take corrective actions, while on the contrary I feel it puts an extra pressure (unknown fear of being evaluated every now and then) on the employee as well as will definitely add to the company’s budget.
In a long term evaluation pattern an employee who needs some corrective actions will keep on going repeating the same over and over again. Here one word of caution that I feel is at the time of hiring or may be handing over the new project an employee should be assessed for his suitability with the job expected of him/her.
Long term evaluation will determine the future growth of the companies.
If companies fail to evaluate long-term goals, I think that these companies are in the troubles because of competition from other companies will use his competitive advantages to win over the companies.
In addition, I think that set up for the long-term goals for companies to run is very important because it will determine how to survive in this new competitive era.
It really depends on the situation and perhaps duration of employment. I think small periods warrant small reviews and large periods larger reviews.
Changes take time. If you focus only on long-term outcomes, you may become discouraged. In addition to setting your long-term
goals, identify desired short-term outcomes. Short-term outcomes provide rapid feedback on the impact of the Action Plan, and
are typically easier to measure. If the short-term outcomes look positive, communicating this throughout the organization or team
will improve overall morale and commitment to the process of improving psychological safety and health.
An effective evaluation is one which will take a certain amount of effort and time to complete. This effort multiplied across your entire workforce can become quite significant. If you want to start doing it twice per year, it can reaaly add up.
I believe in annual evaluations which include the establishment of both long and short term goals. Short term goals can be used for several purposes. One of which is to facilitate an early review of areas where some immediate improvement is warranted. Regardless of whether or not this is the case; regular reviews of an employees’ progress by thier immediate supervisor should be the norm. Not just for disciplinary reasons, but to ensure that an employees’ efforts are being focused in the right direction. As the needs and direction of the company change, so too, should the efforts of the employee. Regular review of progress toward formally established goals is appropriate for keeping an employee on track and inspired as well as an effective means of checks and balances.
If there are issues regarding an employee’s performance, then more frequent reviews or evaluations are warranted, but evaluation for the sake of evaluation is more a hindrance than a help. Most employees would, in my opinion, find it intrusive and somewhat overwhelming to have to be evaluated every six months. Informal review and guidance to help an employee meet their goals is much more effective and considerably less work.
Hi Salima, Thanks for bringing up an important aspect related to Performance Management & employee development. I do agree to your observation that many org lay maximum emphasis on the year end performance evaluation & more often than not, most of the managers rely on their memory which leads to a relaince on recency factor towards evaluation of an employees performance.
My take on this subject would be to install a mechanism for doing a series of regular short term evaluations which should cumulatively be an input or could be considered as a long term evaluation. For instance, let us consider a process where managers have a documented monthly meetings with their team discussing their performance vis-a-vis their goals, their achievements & areas of development & action plan for the next month which would be reviewed in a similar meeting the next month.
With this we would ensure an amalgamation of short term evaluation & will have fact based documented inputs when we get into long term evaluation or annual assessments.
Hope this helps.
Regards
Praveen
You want to do a mix of both–annually is a good time to review two to five year targets, but you need to meet on a regular basis to mark progress against plans or to adjust the plans to current realities. This can be done weekly, monthly or quarterly depending on the situation–keeping in mind that an annual goal may have shorter term components that can be identified, measured and tracked. This is a good way to avoid surprises at the annual review.
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♦♦♦ I support Short Term Evaluation since it allows the corporate to check and see its staff weakness before the year-end, especially those with big human staff, but this requires many efforts and time and a well qualified experts…while yearly Evaluation is good for small companies since they can easily check their small staff performance ♦♦♦
Make Ur Year A Gooood Oneeee
F.A.A.
Hi,
For me it is more than the evaluation a whole some process of review.
If you take an example from a LION wandering in the jungle, for every 12- 14 steps it stops and takes a look around then proceeds. It helps the LION to have full awarness of its surrounding and it can sense and act for any changes accordingly.
How ever when it is chasing the prey its strategy is different.
Same way timely pause and looking around on how we have tread the path, to what extent we are in line and to what extent we have deviated need to be assessed. This gives a lot of clarity on assessing the individual performance and the performances of the teams.
Majority of the times the long term evaluations suffer from the recency effects and the performance and evaluations get colored.
Except for a very few specialist and very routine kind of works it is alaways desirable to go for reviews every quarter or at least per six months.
Kind regards
Dayanand L Guddin
Sr. Head – HR
BOBST INDIA
You actually need both. Regular ‘feedback’ sessions throughout the year allow you to coach and develop your team, as well as course correct as needed. It’s much easier to address situations requiring constructive feedback in small doses as they occur and the pressure associated with a raise or promotion is eliminated because these are just supportive chats. You stand a better chance of controlling a fire while it’s still just a spark – waiting until it is a destructive force benefits noone. If you’ve been providing feeedback throughout the year, the annual evaluation process becomes anticlimatic – you are all on the same page when it comes to performance because you have been working together on it all year. In fact, the evaluations pretty much write themselves because you have everything already documented. It’s also the fairest way to handle performance reviews in that if you wait until the end of the year, you will only be able to remember the things that happened most recently – this could sway the evaluation to be either more positive or negative than it needs to be simply because a current good or bad event stands out most in your mind.
Hi, Salima – good question.
I would rather not even think of employee performance as something to be evaluated solely on a schedule, either short or long term. Putting this important function on a schedule operationalizes it into a procedural item to be checked off a list as “done on time” or “late”.
In my opinion, an effective manager is doing this every day,using opportunties to coach, counsel, and manage their employees. Helping others to improve and thrive should be THE focus of a manager and woven into their working life.
John