The Challenge of Performance Appraisals

Employers and employees often come out of performance review meetings having reached completely different conclusions.

There is often huge gap between what employees believe they are being told at performance review meetings and what their managers think they are telling them, new research has suggested.

Their findings:

• Just two out of five workers believe the performance review process leads to an improvement in performance, compared with more than two thirds of employers.
• Many of the gaps between employers and employees result from unclear communication and limited transparency regarding how the review process is conducted and its impact on the employee.
• More than four out of five employers believed they provided clear goals to their employees prior to the formal performance review. Yet nearly half of employees felt their goals had in fact not been clearly communicated.
• While more than eight out of 10 employers felt they included input from their employees in the process, just four out of 10 employees agreed.