How accurate is Appraisals in Corporates?

How accurate is Appraisals in Corporates???....

1. we self appraise ourself
2. Our Mangers do it
3. rates are distributed based on the population of the cmpany

For those who get less ratings feel bad despite working hard.At times i feel that providing appraisals are flawed.

I need some valuable feedback from Senior Ranchers on this issue

Every company is different in this regard. Some do it well, most do it poorly.

Bear +1
It has been my experience that appraisal is a prerogative of the Manager.
If you are lucky enough to have a good manager who is supportive and fair, well you are lucky. If not, you are lucked out.

IMO, formal appraisals give an illusion of fairness in evaluation employees that frankly, is impossible to attain in any process that requires human judgement. Employees evaluation is always going to be an inherently unfair process, and no amount of process around it is going to eliminate the unfairness.

First, There are always managers who will rate all their employees as exceeding expectation, and managers who will always rate their employees as average. No manager will rate all his/her employees as below expectation. Second, there is a question of the managers having tunnel vision. The manager is going to rate his/her employees based on average for his/her team. This means that an average employee in a very high functioning team will tend to get a lower score than an average employee in a low-functioning team, simply because the manager will be comparing the employee with his/her peers. You put an average fish is a small pond, and the average fish appears to be a super-star.

No 2 managers are going to rate their employees in an equal manner. This requires that Big Boss who controls the purse-strings has to "adjust" the scores, which brings in the bias from Big Boss. End of the day, the Big Boss has an idea of who's getting what, and the final result of the formal process is close to what the Big Boss has already decided.

Performance appraisals can be great communication and motivational tools. They provide an opportunity for the managers to get together with their employees and review what went wrong and what went right. However, IMO, they are poor employee evaluation tools

IMO, it's better to not worry about the "score" that you get at the end. You are a human being, not a number. It is impossible to boil a person down to a floating point number between 1 and 5. Try not to let that number define you. I've witnessed fights between rivals in a company because one got 3.2, and another got 3.3. In the end, it's not really that important. What's really important is the conversation that you have with your manager. Is your manager genuinely interested in advancing your career? Is he talking about how you can meet your goals? Is he doing anything so you can meet your goals? Do the goals that are laid out for you meet your personal career goals?

I have got a different question.

How important is Appraisals in one's career?

Is it something that is going to determine how successful you are going to be in your career or will it really help you to achieve your career goal?

I think having attainable goals and having a conversation with your manager about those goals is helpful in an employee's growth within a company. Formal appraisal is a tool that facilitates that communication, but you can always have conversation like these outside of the yearly appraisal.

As far as your overall career is concerned, it depends. A lot of people who jump company to company and focus on building their skills, appraisals don't really batter, because meh.. by the time you get appraised, you are outta there. They become much more important if you intend to stay at a company for the long term. Ultimately, in your career, you have to stick to one place. Most employers frown upon people who jump ship too often. Besides that, for most people, their personal lives reach a point where they prefer the stability of staying at a job. Once you have a toddler at home, your priority becomes having the flexibility to spend time with the kid. You need to stay at one place to get that flexibility.

In my experience, yearly performance reviews have a miniscule weightage in the overall scheme of things (unless you are really bad at your job, in which case you will be fired anyway). You might be a top performer but if the company is not doing well, or is going through a reorg, or the product/project you are working on is no longer required/outsourced, or if your manager leaves the company (you get the idea

you might still be left out in the cold.

So, IMHO, don't worry about your performance review. Worry about your performance. That will help you where ever you go.

How important is Appraisals in one's career?

Your appraisals are extremely important if you are an employee. However, your relationships with your supervisor(s) is even more important than their appraisal. Fostering positive relationships and establishing good communication is much more important than the latest certification or your ability to write code with Java API. An individual's career growth potential is strongly dependent upon the supervisor. An exception to this is if an individual owns his/her own business or is self-employed. In these cases, relationships with your customers then become extremely important. As you can see, in all scenarios, positive relationships and good communication will help and problems in these areas will hinder you.

Having a "know-it-all" attitude and not establishing good rapport will always prevent you from attaining your goals, in my opinion. It doesn't matter "what" you know or "how" much, software is a very "personal" business.

Jimmy Clark wrote: An individual's career growth potential is strongly dependent upon the supervisor.

Can you please elaborate on this? Thank you.

Saurabh Pillai wrote:

Jimmy Clark wrote: An individual's career growth potential is strongly dependent upon the supervisor.

Can you please elaborate on this? Thank you.

Your supervisor chooses what tasks to give you. Some are more useful than others in terms of growth.

How accurate? Well, how long is a piece of string? Different companies expect different things from their "appraisal" process: some will use it as an annual filter to fire staff, others will use it as a way to check in with staff that they all know what they're doing, some will use it as a way to reward their cronies and punish critics, and some will actually use it to discover ways to improve performance through training/new work opportunities etc. It's worth remembering that many managers have no more clue about how to do this fairly, objectively and accurately than you do, so it's hard to see how anybody can expect this kind of process to produce meaningful results.

How important? Depends where you are, and whether your company is looking to fire staff, because it's much easier to fire staff if you can claim they are performing badly than if you simply have an unspoken policy of replacing older more expensive staff with inexperienced staff to save money, for example.

If you're working for some of the big Indian outsourcing companies, it sounds like it can be pretty important in deciding whether you keep your job.

Of course, one way to avoid all this nonsense is to work freelance. Appraisals are then simply a question of whether the client wants to extend your contract after a few months, or decides to fire you after a week!

Over time an individual may have worked under many supervisors. As an individual is developing his/her career over time, the actual activities and work assignments are largely determined by the supervisor. They also play a significant role in promotions, salary adjustments, training opportunities, and a variety of other important career-related items. If an individual does not have a positive and productive relationship with their supervisor, then it may be extremely difficult to get things accomplished in terms of building a successful career.

Jeanne points out that some superviors are more "useful" than others in terms of career growth. This is very true. Moreover, the "relationship" that you have with the supervisor is a significant factor related to the degree of "usefulness."

Aside, attacking performance management systems on Internet forums may be helpful to some. However, I think that learning how they function in detail and how "you" can make them work for you in your specific situation is a better approach.

Jimmy Clark wrote:Aside, attacking performance management systems on Internet forums may be helpful to some. However, I think that learning how they function in detail and how "you" can make them work for you in your specific situation is a better approach.

Perhaps. But despite the rise of a huge variety of often sophisticated and complex appraisal systems in both private and public sectors over the 25 years I've been in this industry, it seems the Peter Principle (and indeed the Dilbert Principle) are still a daily reality in many organisations, at least in my experience. And many other organisations are simply muddling through, doing the best they can with unwieldy or ineffective appraisal systems that can soak up a lot of time and effort with very little benefit.

So it's true that you can devote a lot of effort to learn how to game the particular appraisal system in your workplace in order to perform well in your appraisals. Or you can devote that time and effort to performing well in your job. I tend to take the latter view, insofar as these issues affect my working life, so my rules of thumb would be:

Do your own job well.

If you want a different job, try to develop and demonstrate your potential for doing that job well.

Try to help others to do their jobs well (including your boss).

If the appraisal system is any good, then being good at your job ought to be recognised by the system. If the system isn't any good, you're better off being good at what you do and getting out of that particular organisation anyway.

Bear Bibeault wrote:Every company is different in this regard. Some do it well, most do it poorly.

True . Some manager see how you are committed to the project and Others see how you are committed to them!