Ups and downs of Performance Appraisals (PA)

I see two parts in a PA. Part one is your year in retrospect. Part two is an evaluation of your current skills. The well done PA helps determine your strengths and is also a wake up call that exposes your weaknesses. When you know your weaknesses it is easy to prepare a Personal Development Plan (PDP). Your PDP should have courses and things you need to do to improve your weaknesses. Your PDP should effectively direct your efforts to better yourself.

The feeble part of the PA process is the feedback. First you must ask co-worker who you collaborated with to give you a feedback. Co-workers in return are requesting a feedback from you. I end up spending half a day on a feedback while the work is accumulating. Ok… maybe I’m over doing it; I was told “spend 20 minutes to an hour, which should be enough”. Ha! Ha! Ha! Well maybe for a writer, but I’m neither writer nor pure Anglophone and it usually takes me hours (plural). Having two feedbacks to type, sets me back an entire day. What if I get more! Yikes! Don’t forget that every feedback you request, that person spends up to half a day typing it up too. In my opinion, in most cases, the drain on company resources does not amount to the benefit received from the feedback. I’m curious how long everyone else truly spend on a feedback.

I always try to get my Manager to do my feedback. My manager’s feedback is always rewarding and exposes the good and the bad. What if your manager is too busy? Of course you ask other people but what benefit a feedback has when it is filled with fluffy sentences and repeat of your achievements . In most feedbacks you can forget about the section asking “what could I have done better” because it is usually left empty. Is it because they are shy?

Feedbacks should expose the negative because this is how you discover what require improvement. When I’m typing someone’s feedback, I always try to write something constructive, something I think they could do better!

When it is the first time you complete a PA, the result can be traumatic because you only see the negative. On the other hand, looking back at your previous PA and compare it to the new one is very rewarding because you know that you are improving.