Employee Performance Appraisals example essay topic

Pro: Performance Appraisals should be banned from use. I. Position Statement In the business world today, there are many stressors that take place in the course of a working day. Employees have things to worry about such as deadlines, meetings, presentations, and many other problems that they face during the day. Performance appraisals just add to this on growing stress and should be banned from use in organizations today. II. Identification of the Issue The definition of a performance appraisal is the evaluation of a persons performance. I submit that this definition makes the process sound easy and effortless.

A performance appraisal is used for many reasons and it shows how an employee is doing according to standards that are set by the organization. Accurate appraisals help supervisors to fulfill their duties as evaluators and coaches. But the major reason that performance appraisals are being used today is because they are supposed to give employees feedback on their individual performance on the job. This process helps supervisors and managers to determine promotion candidates, termination candidates, and to determine employee satisfaction and employee needs.

This process is done in different ways by different organizations. Some organizations like to do performance evaluations once every year, and some like to do it more than that. Most companies that I read about like to do them once every year. The managers sit down and think about how their employee is doing, things like attitude, effort, enthusiasm, skill, promptness, and things of this nature are just some of the criteria for performance appraisals. In order to have any validity this process must be well understood by the employees of the organization an specific goals must be set for each job.

These are the basic definitions and the process that managers and supervisors must go through in order to accomplish performance evaluations.. Arguments Senior managers and employees share a common aversion to performance appraisals. Employee evaluations was an accepted practice during the mid 1980's, it has now ceased to be a popular way of defining and rating performance. This argument can be seen from two points of view, the managers point of view, and the employees point of view. Managers detest the time, and paperwork involved.

They are faced with many difficult choices, and discomfort that often accompany the appraisal process. By 1993 so many people had been laid off, and so much had been written about restructuring and the many good people whod been displaced, that the stigma was eroding for workers and the incentive for managers to document failure was diminished. (Kennedy PG 2) Layoffs were happening so often that managers and supervisors were using the word layoff, when it really meant fired. Outplacement became an antidote to confrontation. Why bother to labor over a detailed record of errors observed, assignments missed, and attitude problems when drop-kicking the individual into the layoff pool was simpler (Kennedy 2) Employees that were in fact fired felt that they had a shared fate with other co-workers rather than thinking about a lawsuit opportunity. One manager said, Why fire someone when you can lay him off, complete with a goodbye party (Kennedy 2) Another reason that appraisals are becoming more obsolete is because of the high turnover rates.

Many mangers and top managers are looking for more bodies and more employees instead of in-depth appraisals of those already in place. Should managers waste their time doing appraisals on an employee that has only been in the organization for three months and is already looking for another job Managers often give employees very high scores on performance appraisals just to avoid conflict. They do not want to deal with angry employees so to keep their employees satisfied they give them high ratings. Besides after managers do make their decisions they must justify their assessments face to face with their employees, which is something that most managers do not want to do. So if something were really wrong how would you know it anyway Since 1995, another trend has emerged to further erode the importance of the review process. Younger workers care less about performance appraisals than older workers did, because they are less competitive with peers, and their performance appraisal system in place that doesnt rank people either against an arbitrary standard or against peers.

(Kennedy 3) In the work world and even sports today, people are competing against their own best efforts. Athletes strive to beat their all time best performance and businessmen and women strive to better themselves and prepare themselves for new and better things to come. Performance appraisals are often very one sided. When I talk about one sided I mean that managers can base their assessments on their attitudes towards the employees, or could just use recent examples of behavior instead of overall performance. If a manager has bad feeling or attitude towards an employee are they going to honestly assess the employee or put personal bias into play Diane Kristen raises a very interesting point in an interview conducted by Nancy Pekala. Differences in interpretation are particularly evident when an employee changes supervisors.

A long-term employee may have been receiving superlative reviews for 15 years, but then a new supervisor will score the employee lower. Did the former supervisor score the employee too high, is there a personality conflict between the employee and the new supervisor, or does the new supervisor just have a different definition of what constitutes an 8 (Pekala 2) For employee appraisals to be effective managers must have constant feedback to their workers, not just at the time of the appraisal. One employee said, Performance appraisals give my manager a chance to evaluate my performance over the past year. Sometimes the information is a surprise to me. (McCarthy 1) This is a prime example that employees are clueless as to how they are doing on a regular basis.

How can employees be expected to change a certain behavior if they just find out about it at the end of the year or before they are terminated Often at times organizations have generic appraisals not specific ones for each position. One manager says, Our appraisals arent relevant. They dont address the actual performance issues I have with my employees. (McCarthy 2) Employees want clarity when they are being evaluated, if they truly have the desire to improve they want to know exactly what they need to improve upon.

Employee performance appraisals are definitely a controversial issue that organizations face today. Managers and employees are seeking better ways to communicate with each other, and performance appraisals just arent cutting it. Many organizations still require performance appraisals and require their managers to waste their time doing something that is not relevant to their employees. So why do we have such appraisals when they dont help the manager to better assess his or her employees, and they dont help the employee understand what they have to do to improve their performance on the job 36 b.