Appraisals and development

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	HR Consulting Associates

Appraisal & development

Recognising and developing staff skills is a central requirement for business success.

Unfortunately, most "appraisals" don't work!

They fail for a comprehensive list of reasons:

Presupposing advanced management abilities in setting targets and objectives, plus converting these into skills for training/development purposes.
Many objectives are lost causes anyway - priorities change within the year, and achievement or failure is often outside job holder control.
Performance measurement is extraordinarily difficult to objectively defend - outside the extremes - unless underpinned by validated and clear performance definitions.
Consistency across functions, or between managers, is a challenge.
Rather tangled implementation and comprehension of competencies, whether technical or behavioural.
Overly complex documentation.

And so on. We like to look at the overall picture:

What is the true purpose of appraisals in the context of the unique organisation?
How does this relate to associated HR processes - bonuses, profit or performance related pay, JE and grading, TNA, skills database, succession, assessment centres.
How can the process be made manager (and staff member) friendly!
If appraisal is a gate to earnings, promotion or development, can everyone be comfortable on non-discrimination.

We have strong views on - and successful experience of - turning appraisal and development systems into integrated constructive processes. The same answer is not right in every context - measurable goals can work (arguably) in production and sales environments. But in general we prefer the "can do" rather than the "can't do" approaches, and find that competency based techniques - perhaps tied to NVQ standards - can work very well. Investors in People environments especially need the coherent factual objectivity of these approaches.

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