However, is it enough to look at the New Year’s resolutions of the organisation as a whole? What about the resolutions and goals of each employee? After all, they may have their own professional goals they wish to fulfil, such as gaining a new skill or professional qualification, networking with colleagues or working towards a promotion.

Understanding your employee’s professional goals is essential for your business, as it will allow you, your managers and your HR team to integrate employees’ professional goals into their workplace objectives. Assisting your employees in achieving their professional new year’s resolutions will not only benefit them but your organisation too.

How Can You Incorporate Your Employee’s Goals Into Your Business?

Before you can even begin to integrate employees’ goals and find ways to help them achieve their ambitions in the workplace, you need to be aware of what their goals are. So you need to start by having meaningful conversations with your employees about what they hope to achieve during the work year.

From this conversation, you can begin to work through the resolutions your employees have in mind, determine which are relevant to the business, how they can be incorporated into current objectives or KPIs and the ways your organisation can help them.

Create Achievable Goals

Achieving a goal cannot be done overnight; small, consistent steps need to be taken in order to reach it. HR team members can sit down with employees, discuss their new year’s resolutions, and then help them to devise an action plan consisting of smaller, attainable objectives that will help them reach their overarching goal.

Assign deadlines

Deadlines give you a timeframe in which you can work towards your goal. This can create a sense of urgency for employees and their aims and ensure that they do the work to accomplish their resolutions.

Help assess progress

HR teams can check in with employees on a regular basis, such as once a month, to see how they’re getting on with their resolutions and goals. This will help employees see where they are currently in relation to achieving their goals. If they’re on track or exceeding expectations, that’s fantastic. If not, then the HR team can help them review their strategy.

What Can HR Teams Do To Help?

HR departments are typically responsible for recruiting, processing payroll, and conducting disciplinary proceedings. However, they also contribute to employees by providing career path guidance, offering educational or training opportunities and offering general support.

These skills can prove advantageous when incorporating employees’ new year’s resolutions into the business. Many employee goals, such as learning a new skill or working towards a promotion, will require training and guidance.

If you’re looking to set, track, manage and report on employee goals efficiently, get in touch with the Natural HR team today, or book a demo to see our employee performance management module in action.

The post Incorporating Employees’ New Year’s Resolutions & Goals Into Your Business appeared first on Natural HR.

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• Highlighting training gaps and where further training is needed.
• Boosting employee morale and in turn, productivity and performance.
• Helps identify the right employees for promotion.
• Improves workforce planning, including managing workloads and delegation.
• Boosts employee retention/reduces employee turnover.
• Gives employees more autonomy to manage their responsibilities.

What is Performance Management?

Performance Management begins with clear job descriptions and recruitment processes that help you bring on board the right people, and onboarding programmes to help them hit the ground running.

It’s a framework that will help employees perform and reach their potential, creating an environment where they can thrive.

Once in the job, it means a never-ending cycle of education, coaching and feedback. Turning every interaction between manager and employee into a learning experience and a chance for the employee to be heard.

It’s this mentality that really underpins a Performance Management strategy. Recognising that feedback and direction isn’t something that should happen annually, but is integral to your employees’ everyday experience.

Progressive organisations are now implementing a more continuous approach to managing, motivating and rewarding good performance.  Research has found that 74% of managers that are effectively coaching and developing their employees say a Performance Management system is effective. 62% of these say their business’ performance is better than their competitors (Mckinsey, 2018). A key way to recognize these efforts is also to award employees with crystal, metal or glass plaques.

Importance of Performance Management

Continuous, effective Performance Management helps foster an open dialogue between employees, management and the company as a whole. This increases trust and ensures everyone feels better supported and more engaged. Without this, employees are more likely to feel detached from their work and its role within the organisation, which is very likely to result in a higher rate of staff turnover.

8 Benefits of Performance Management

Aside from the aforementioned boost in profitability, what other benefits can Performance Management deliver?

1. Highlights training needs

Introducing more frequent reviews, whether formal or informal, can help to better understand the skill set of employees. Providing an open forum for employees to share and discuss their roles regularly can help to identify training needs before they have an impact on productivity.

Whether your employees need to brush up on a certain skill or simply get up to speed with new trends for their role; Performance Management and regular reviews can help to identify any shortcomings or future training requirements.

2. Boosts morale

Everyone likes being told they’re doing a good job. Performance reviews provide the perfect setting to formalise and document praise. But reviews shouldn’t just be about setting objectives for the coming quarter. It should also provide an environment for a line manager to recognise individuals on their team.

Happy employees are productive employees. A staggering 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being recognised. No longer is a paycheck enough recognition but regular feedback and reviews are key to maintaining employee morale.

3. Helps with identifying the right employees for promotion

Regular reviews are a great way to better understand the performance of your employees and their suitability for promotion.

All employees will be going through the same performance review process. As such managers can better evaluate them for promotion, salary increases or transfer in the same, consistent manner. Not only will this help to ensure the right employee is chosen for promotion; but will allow for more transparency and fairness in your selection process.

4. Helps define career paths

Clearly defined, identifiable career paths provide employees with a goal within the organisation, boosting motivation and significantly reducing staff turnover.

5. Supports workforce planning

Frequent reviews with employees as part of a wider Performance Management strategy can also help with workforce planning. Discussing current and future workloads with employees can help to identify any requirements for future staff.

What’s more, if your employees are struggling with their current workloads; provisions can be made to share the load amongst other team members and prioritise the most important tasks.

6. Increases employee retention

Research by HR Daily Advisor earlier this year found that companies who implement regular employee feedback have turnover rates that are 14.9% lower than for employees who receive no feedback. High staff turnover could have a major impact on your company. Not to mention the impact on staff morale and simply getting things done.

The nature of Performance Management ensures that the expectations of your employees and their objectives are clear and regularly reviewed. What’s more, the introduction of regular feedback sessions and reviews allows an employee to raise and resolve any issues.

When employees have the chance to regularly interact with their managers, communication becomes more fluid and easy. Furthermore, managers are kept in the loop regarding their team’s progress and any potential issues.

A good performance review strategy will allow for regular feedback – both formal and informal. It will prioritise employee recognition and encourage learning and development.

In addition, when managers offer additional fringe benefits as part of performance reviews, it can help align employee goals with company goals and create a more engaged workforce, which leads to better performance and retention.

7. Delivers greater employee autonomy

Once your employees are aware of the wider business’ objectives and their contribution to those; they are relatively free to make their own choices about how they go about their responsibilities. As a result, employees are happier, more committed, more productive and more loyal than those whose every action is dictated.

Line managers will have the reassurance of regular feedback sessions and discussions to review an employee’s progress against their agreed objectives. This fosters a culture of trust and initiative amongst your employees. A culture where ideas and creativity flow freely. Such a culture will only stand to benefit your business in the long term.

8. Improves accountability

Accountability plays an important role in the success of an organisation, but ensuring effective accountability isn’t easy. Often, accountability is equated to a culture of blame. This is not only wrong but highly detrimental to company culture and employee morale. Effective accountability defines a company’s mission, values, and goals, and ensure each individual understands their role within that.

Natural HR makes introducing a Performance Management process to your business a breeze. You can build custom Performance Management forms, set up a schedule and send out timely reminders to both employees and managers to keep things on track. Get a free demo today to find out how we can support your Performance Management strategy in 2022.

How to get started with Performance Management

In the era of instant feedback – where reviews and ratings govern many of our daily decisions – the annual employee appraisal can be considered antiquated at best.

Twelve months is a long time in business, yet many will happily leave it this long to provide any genuine feedback to their staff. This often stunts an employee’s potential, to the detriment of both the individual and the business.

An approach that provides ongoing, genuine and consistent support for employee development and growth – even before they join the business. Such a shift in approach will, of course, take time to implement. Here are four steps you can take to start the process:

1. Define your objectives

Performance Management is a somewhat broad term, and no two businesses will go about its implementation the same way.

To help define your strategy, it’s important to have clear goals and objectives in mind, beyond simply ‘helping employees do better’. Raising morale or boosting productivity will naturally have an impact on your bottom line, but without a clear goal, success is hard to measure.

You should, therefore, look to set and document some clear objectives that can be tracked. This could be certain financial goals, improved staff retention numbers or increased satisfaction scores in customer service surveys. Ultimately, your Performance Management programme should align with your organisation’s strategic goals.

2. Communicate the benefits

In aiding the development of employee skills and encouraging them to reach their potential, a Performance Management framework can be great. But it’s important to realise that employees could perceive your intentions very differently.

Workers might see the continuous coaching ethos as micro-managing, or perceive the added focus on performance as extra pressure. Similarly, managers themselves may worry about how they’ll fit more regular catch-up sessions into an already busy schedule.

Communicating your plans and objectives clearly and honestly will help people buy into the new approach. Explain exactly what changes you’re making, why you’re making them and what it means for individuals going forward.

Remember that from an employee perspective, performance evaluation is linked to salary. So be clear on how it will affect wage increases and promotions. If you’re moving away from annual appraisals, you can bet the first question on employees’ minds will be: “When do we get our salary reviewed?

3. Train your managers

It’s widely accepted that for a modern manager to succeed, they must be able to coach. But that’s not to say every manager has the natural ability to do so.

If you’re asking managers to make feedback and coaching a key part of their relationship with employees, give them the confidence and skill set to do so. Whether through workshops or one-on-one sessions, think about how you will give your managers the training they need. How can you use that time to further communicate the benefits your Performance Management programme will bring?

4. Take advantage of technology

Perhaps the most fundamental first step towards efficient, effective Performance Management is finding the right technology to support it.

Many cloud-based HR platforms provide Performance Management functionality to help shape and support your new, improved processes. Built-in workflows and goal-setting features are geared towards managing and motivating performance on a continuous basis.

Goal setting functions typically allow you to set and communicate goals at both company and employee level. This will help to keep individuals engaged in their work by regularly refreshing targets.

Meanwhile, customised schedules and automatic reminders can help ensure that both managers and employees stay on track with regular catch-ups.

Conclusion on Performance Management benefits

Performance Management frameworks are already yielding positive results for adopters – encouraging more businesses to rethink their approach to appraisals.

Don’t just introduce a Performance Management plan for the sake of it. It’s important to set clear objectives and monitor its ongoing success. After all, in the culture of Performance Management, even your Performance Management programme itself can benefit from constant feedback and review.

The post The Importance & Benefits of Managing Employee Performance appeared first on Natural HR.

Research has shown that:

• The employee engagement rate in the UK is 50%.
• Employees are 17% more engaged if they can participate in a regular feedback programme.
• Companies that effectively turn feedback into action have an 80% employee engagement rate.
• 50% of workers agree that managers helping with career development drive employee engagement.
• 55% of workers agree that recognition for good work drives employee engagement.

But where does your company’s HR platform come into play?

Your ideal HR platform will feature an employee engagement module where relationships between both the employer and employee, but also between employees, can develop the company’s workplace culture.

Digital and cloud-based platforms have revolutionised the relationship between employees and employers, and in 2021, using a single platform can reduce the number of data silos and increase the connection between both parties.

However, to engage your employees, you must make sure that you choose the right platform for your employees and your company. When you leverage your HR platform to support employee engagement, you’re making the first steps in:

• Increasing employee engagement and productivity within your company.
• Improving employee retention by providing a positive workplace culture.
• Creating an employee culture that supports personal and professional development.
• Developing your employer brand to boost your company’s attraction to future employees.

This blog post will look at what features your HR platform should offer when you’re looking to engage your employees in the workplace.

The four key features of HR platforms for keeping your employees engaged

Disengagement can cause real damage to your organisation, but to help support your company, here are four ways that HR professionals can better deploy their HR platforms to engage employees within your organisation.

1. Communicate regularly and with purpose: To keep your staff engaged, wherever your employees are spending their time – be that digitally or physically, you’ll want to start communicating news more frequently and intentionally. By making use of your HR system, you will help keep your people in the loop with what’s going on, whether that’s a change to your HR policies, an update on working from home, or even some good news, like a new sale being made.

With Natural HR, you can achieve this in many ways, including integrating your HR platform with communication applications like Slack, allowing you to update your team on essential messages quickly.

2. Make sure you invite feedback from your staff and act on it: Cloud-based technology makes it easier than ever for employers to regularly seek and collate employee feedback through 360* degree feedback, one-to-one performance reviews, or even Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs).

Natural HR’s platform allows you, from one central location, to invite feedback from every member of staff through 360* feedback, nine-box grid, review forms while also allowing you to manage performance meetings and issue warnings if needed.

3. Recognise when your staff go above and beyond their role: Putting in place an option where your team can thank each other for going the extra mile, or management can highlight something special is an excellent way of cultivating a culture of public thanks and recognition, and ultimately, increasing workplace culture.

One such way that you can do this with Natural HR is through the built-in social stream, which allows you to post a company-wide message, such as, “Kieran Richards has been recognised by James Dawson: I would like to thank Kieran for all his help with last week’s customer problem – it was appreciated!”

4. Encourage your staff to invest in personal development: Learning about your employees can also help you identify what training would benefit them and acquire new skills and competencies that will provide them with personal and professional satisfaction.

Supporting your employees’ personal development shows them that you help them achieve their goals, making them work even more challenging. Your employees are gaining new knowledge, allowing you to retain valuable talent while elevating engagement levels in your team.

Natural HR can help you achieve this with its dedicated training and development module that allows you to track, manage, and build on your staff’s training requirements.

Choose an HR platform that supports you with employee engagement.

The employee engagement module within Natural HR has been designed to allow HR professionals to create and support the perfect workplace culture. Natural HR has built an extensive library of resources that can help you develop employee engagement within your workforce.

These resources include:

• Learn more about employee engagement surveys with Natural HR’s complete guide in this blog post.
• Discover how to improve employee engagement while cutting HR costs in 3 ways with our insights.
• Insights into how HR software can transform your employee experience.
• Understand how better onboarding can boost employee effectiveness with our insights.

To find out more about how Natural HR can help your business, including elements like employee engagement, by booking a free demo today.

The post How can you leverage your HR platform to keep your employees engaged with your company? appeared first on Natural HR.

• Performance Reviews
• Goal library
• Competences
• Succession Planning  
• 9 Box Grid
• 360 Feedback
• Warnings 
• Programs
• Employee Recognition

The post 4 ways to optimise performance management appeared first on Natural HR.

A performance management strategy can ensure your employees’ activities and output are in line with your wider business’ objectives and can be critical to business success and employee productivity. The benefits of an effective performance management strategy include:

• Highlighting training gaps and where further training is needed.
• Boosting employee morale and in turn, productivity and performance.
• Helps identify the right employees for promotion.
• Improves workforce planning, including managing workloads and delegation.
• Boost employee retention/reduces employee turnover.
• Gives employees more autonomy to manage their responsibilities.

What is performance management in HR?

Defined by the CIPD as “the activities and processes that focus on skills, resources and support to maintain and improve employee performance in line with an organisation’s objectives,” performance management encompasses a number of HR initiatives including KPIs and objectives, performance reviews, feedback and L&D.

Research has found that employees who receive regular feedback on their strengths are on average 8.9% more profitable (Gallup, 2016).

Why is performance management important?

Continuous, effective performance management helps foster an open dialogue between employees, management and the company as a whole. This increases trust and ensures everyone feels better supported and more engaged. Without this, employees are more likely to feel detached from their work and its role within the organisation, which is very likely to result in a higher rate of staff turnover.

8 Benefits of Performance Management

Aside from the aforementioned boost in profitability, what other benefits can performance management deliver?

1. Highlights training needs

Introducing more frequent reviews, whether formal or informal, can help to better understand the skillset of employees. Providing an open forum for employees to share and discuss their roles regularly can help to identify training needs before they have an impact on productivity.

Whether your employees need to brush up on a certain skill or simply get up to speed with new trends for their role; performance management and regular reviews can help to identify any shortcomings or future training requirements.

2. Boosts morale

Everyone likes being told they’re doing a good job. Performance reviews provide the perfect setting to formalise and document praise. But reviews shouldn’t just be about setting objectives for the coming quarter. It should also provide an environment for a line manager to recognise individuals on their team.

Happy employees are productive employees. A staggering 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being recognised. No longer is a pay check enough recognition but regular feedback and reviews are key to maintaining employee morale.

3. Helps with identifying the right employees for promotion

Regular reviews are a great way to better understand the performance of your employees and their suitability for promotion.

All employees will be going through the same performance review process. As such managers can better evaluate them for promotion, salary increases or transfer in the same, consistent manner. Not only will this help to ensure the right employee is chosen for promotion; but will allow for more transparency and fairness in your selection process.

4. Helps define career paths

Clearly defined, identifiable career paths provide employees with a goal within the organisation, boosting motivation and significantly reducing staff turnover.

5. Supports workforce planning

Frequent reviews with employees as part of a wider performance management strategy can also help with workforce planning. Discussing current and future workloads with employees can help to identify any requirements for future staff.

What’s more, if your employees are struggling with their current workloads; provisions can be made to share the load amongst other team members and prioritise the most important tasks.

6. Increases employee retention

Research by HR Daily Advisor earlier this year found that companies who implement regular employee feedback have turnover rates that are 14.9% lower than for employees who receive no feedback. High staff turnover could have a major impact on your company. Not to mention the impact on staff morale and simply getting things done.

The nature of performance management ensures that the expectations of your employees and their objectives are clear and regularly reviewed. What’s more, the introduction of regular feedback sessions and reviews allows an employee to raise and resolve any issues.

When employees have the chance to regularly interact with their managers, communication becomes more fluid and easy. Furthermore, managers are kept in the loop regarding their team’s progress and any potential issues.

A good performance review strategy will allow for regular feedback – both formal and informal. It will prioritise employee recognition and encourage learning and development.

7. Delivers greater employee autonomy

Once your employees are aware of the wider business’ objectives and their contribution to those; they are relatively free to make their own choices about how they go about their responsibilities. As a result, employees are happier, more committed, more productive and more loyal than those whose every action is dictated.

Line managers will have the reassurance of regular feedback sessions and discussion to review an employee’s progress against their agreed objectives. This fosters a culture of trust and initiative amongst your employees. A culture where ideas and creativity flow freely. Such a culture will only stand to benefit your business in the long-term.

8. Improves accountability

Accountability plays an important role in the success of an organisation, but ensuring effective accountability isn’t easy. Often, accountability is equated to a culture of blame. This is not only wrong, but highly detrimental to company culture and employee morale. Effective accountability defines a company’s mission, values, and goals, and ensure each individual understands their role within that.

Natural HR makes introducing a performance management process to your business a breeze. You can build custom performance management forms, set up a schedule and send out timely reminders to both employees and managers to keep things on track. Get a free demo today to find out how we can support your performance management strategy in 2020.

The post Employee Performance Management: What Is It & What Are Its Benefits? appeared first on Natural HR.

In the era of instant feedback – where reviews and ratings govern many of our daily decisions – the annual employee appraisal can be considered antiquated at best.

Twelve months is a long time in business, yet many will happily leave it this long to provide any genuine feedback to their staff. This often stunts an employee’s potential, to the detriment of both the individual and the business.

An approach which provides ongoing, genuine and consistent support for employee development and growth – even before they join the business.

It’s known as Performance Management.

What is Performance Management?

Performance Management begins with clear job descriptions and recruitment processes that help you bring on board the right people, and on-boarding programmes to help them hit the ground running.

It’s a framework that will help employees perform and reach their potential, creating an environment where they can thrive.

Once in the job, it means a never-ending cycle of education, coaching and feedback. Turning every interaction between manager and employee into a learning experience and a chance for the employee to be heard.

It’s this mentality that really underpins a Performance Management strategy. Recognising that feedback and direction isn’t something that should happen annually, but is integral to your employees’ everyday experience.

Progressive organisations are now implementing a more continuous approach to managing, motivating and rewarding good performance.  Research has found that 74% of managers that are effectively coaching and developing their employees say a Performance Management system is effective. 62% of these say their business’ performance is better than their competitors (Mckinsey, 2018).

Such a shift in approach will, of course, take time to implement. In this blog, we’ll look at how you can start taking steps in the right direction.

1. Define your objectives

Performance Management is a somewhat broad term, and no two businesses will go about its implementation the same way.

To help define your strategy, it’s important to have clear goals and objectives in mind, beyond simply ‘helping employees do better’.

Raising morale or boosting productivity will naturally have an impact on your bottom line, but without a clear goal, success is hard to measure.

You should, therefore, look to set and document some clear objectives that can be tracked. This could be certain financial goals, improved staff retention numbers or increased satisfaction scores in customer service surveys.

Ultimately, your Performance Management programme should align with your organisation’s strategic goals.

2. Communicate the benefits

In aiding the development of employee skills and encouraging them reach their potential, a Performance Management framework can be great. But it’s important to realise that employees could perceive your intentions very differently.

Workers might see the continuous coaching ethos as micro-managing, or perceive the added focus on performance as extra pressure. Similarly, managers themselves may worry about how they’ll fit more regular catch-up sessions into an already busy schedule.

Communicating your plans and objectives clearly and honestly will help people buy into the new approach. Explain exactly what changes you’re making, why you’re making them and what it means for individuals going forward.

Remember that from an employee perspective, performance evaluation is linked to salary. So be clear on how it will affect wage increases and promotions.

If you’re moving away from annual appraisals, you can bet the first question on employees’ minds will be: “When do we get our salary reviewed?

3. Train your managers

It’s widely accepted that for a modern manager to succeed, they must be able to coach. But that’s not to say every manager has the natural ability to do so.

If you’re asking managers to make feedback and coaching a key part of their relationship with employees, give them the confidence and skill set to do so.

Whether through workshops or one-on-one sessions, think about how you will give your managers the training they need. How can you use that time to further communicate the benefits your Performance Management programme will bring?

4. Take advantage of technology

Perhaps the most fundamental first step towards efficient, effective Performance Management is finding the right technology to support it.

Many cloud-based HR platforms provide Performance Management functionality to help shape and support your new, improved processes. Built-in workflows and goal-setting features are geared towards managing and motivating performance on a continuous basis.

Goal setting functions typically allow you to set and communicate goals at both company and employee level. This will help to keep individuals engaged in their work by regularly refreshing targets.

Meanwhile, customised schedules and automatic reminders can help ensure that both managers and employees stay on track with regular catch-ups.

Performance Management: why do it?

Performance Management frameworks are already yielding positive results for adopters – encouraging more businesses to rethink their approach to appraisals.

Don’t just introduce a Performance Management plan for the sake of it. It’s important to set clear objectives and monitor its ongoing success.

After all, in the culture of Performance Management, even your Performance Management programme itself can benefit from constant feedback and review…

For more information on the benefits of performance management, read this blog post.

The post How to get started with Performance Management appeared first on Natural HR.

Whether you are of the thinking appraisals are a process driven, a form-filling activity that takes away creativity and adds more administrative pressure to managers and HR managers, or you think a standardised appraisal system is key to company performance – the importance to get it right, whatever approach you take is fundamental to success.

Even if you are a small, micro business getting the building blocks right to a successful, motivated and objective orientated workforce is key from the moment you hire someone.

You might have a brilliant employer branding strategy, excellent onboarding processes and a strong organisational culture, but does every employee understand their role, their objectives and how they align with the overall strategy and what they need to do to support it?

So what are appraisals?

Performance Appraisals or Performance Reviews as sometimes they are known are an individual plan for each employee. They don’t necessarily need to be resource heavy, paperwork-heavy and an unfavourable process, but they are key.

An appraisal should reflect the employee’s job, their key responsibilities, their wider participation within the team and their overall contribution (or expected contribution) to company-wide business objectives.

Appraisals should focus on performance and personal development with specific areas for employees and employers to concentrate their efforts on above and beyond the day-to-day environment.

Our 7 stage appraisal process breaks it down;

1) What should an appraisal look like?

Appraisals can look like a number of things, an Excel spreadsheet, a word document, or even a hand written piece of paper. More often than not, appraisals now ‘live’ online in the cloud as part of an organisation’s HR system freeing up storage space and keeping information secure (and handy!)

Whatever format you choose, keep it consistent across the business and stick with it!

But what does an appraisal actually look like? What messages? What themes? What headlines?

This is company-specific and again usually designed by the HR department to formalise the process and keep it consistent across the organisation. Even if appraisals are online, messages and key themes need to be organisation-wide but make sure they are specific to your organisation and not a standardised template (all good HR systems with performance management modules should be able to do this!)

For example, an appraisal could have SMART objectives; Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-Based or it could be less measurable with top line ideas and expectations to be achieved.

Whatever headline messages you choose, whatever KPI’s you want to track, consider the purpose of an appraisal; to manage performance across the business and highlight opportunities for professional, personal development to achieve success.

2) Who should develop an appraisal?

Another healthy debate within the HR world, with HR professionals pushing people managers to be more self-serving, while managers often believe this is the responsibility of the HR department.

As HR departments become more active in business planning, keeping abreast of individual plans isn’t the best use of an HR professional’s time.

It is much better for the employee’s line manager to develop an appraisal with both the HR department, who can give a high level, company-wide objectives and then the employee who will be able to advise on their capability to deliver.

An appraisal, shouldn’t be a rigid document and process with a one type fits all approach (which is it why can’t be something HR are fully responsible for).  An appraisal needs to consider the individual, the manager and the department.  After all you can’t apply the same appraisal document to the receptionist in a hospital to a junior doctor; their key strengths and responsibilities couldn’t be further apart.

3) Who is responsible for an appraisal?

Line managers are ultimately responsible for the appraisal process within their employee management responsibilities.  However, for appraisals to be effective and not a document that sits on a shelf (or in the cloud) for the next 12 months, the appraisal process needs to be collectively owned by the manager, the employee and the HR department.

• The HR department is responsible for standardising the appraisal method, format, tools, information collection and storage across the business.
• The line manager is responsible for understanding the objectives and goals of the department they manage, the individual team members within it, their contribution, their skills and what they individually need to achieve to deliver the objectives of the department.
• The employee, without the employee’s significant input the appraisal process will fall at the first hurdle. The employee needs to feel engaged with the process and understand their personal development is important to the business which feeds through to their performance and the overall performance of the business.

Click here If you want to find out more about how Natural HR’s online HR software can support your business with performance management from HR to self-service

4) When do appraisals take place?

This is a hot topic in HR and business in general with answers ranging from informal day-to-day appraisal reviews to monthly to quarterly to half-yearly to once a year reviews to tick the HR box (or none at all!)

What works for one business, might not work for another and the same applies to your people after all everyone is individual.

One thing we suggest is doing them, and don’t do it once a year to tick the box.  Your people are important assets in your business, ensure they are engaged with your business, ensure they feel empowered to be part of a bigger picture, appraisals provide an opportunity to listen to your employee and listen to their requirements to be able to perform better.

5) Where do appraisals take place?

This is again down to the company, company values and company culture.  Appraisals are ultimately a conversation. Conversations can either be formal and set within a formal environment, or they could be in the local coffee shop.  Wherever you choose, choose somewhere away from the day-to-day environment, away from the wider team and somewhere you can converse clearly and openly.

Another suggestion for appraisals even in the digital world is to do them face-to-face wherever possible.  If you manage remote staff, then face-to-face reviews might not be something you can often do, but wherever you can, appraisals are best approached in person.

6) How long do appraisals have to take and how do you do them?

Again, this depends on the frequency you do them.  If you leave them in the filing cabinet all year, you will have a longer discussion.  The more regular you do appraisals, the easier and quicker they become. If they form part of regular one-to-ones, then there’s no need to diarise monthly appraisal meetings – they could be an additional 15 minutes as part of the regular work in progress catch up. If your organisation has a more formal performance management process, dedicated appraisal times might be required. Whatever frequency you choose, make sure you discuss progress and any barriers to progression. Review the objectives and the KPIs and check whether the objectives set are still valid, especially if appraisals are infrequent.

7) How do you actually deliver appraisals?

‘Doing appraisals’ doesn’t need to be scary. The less you think of appraisals as a ‘doing’ activity, the more they become part of your management style, the easier they become.

In most organisations, especially those with 50 employees or more, HR departments will (or should) deliver an overview of the appraisal process, and offer support to managers to deliver appraisals.

However, there can be tricky appraisals. Not all employees deliver time and time again to the expectations set by the organisation, and delivering negative feedback can be difficult.

Why are appraisals important to my business and why is it important to get right?

To summarise, appraisals are important conversations to align employee’s outputs, performance and personal development with the business strategy.

Appraisals whether formal or informal provide a framework for both employer and employee. A systematic approach to monitoring performance and employee engagement. Whatever process you choose, use good tools around it to support the overall requirements.

Take a look at Natural HR’s performance appraisal module to find out how we could support your appraisal process.

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Some reasons you may create one are;

• To gauge what an employee’s strengths are and where they feel confident.
• Work out where an employee needs to improve.
• Assessing progress on their skills and confidence over time.
• Detecting critiques from colleagues which they perhaps can’t see themselves.
• Finding out what the working relationships in the workplace are like and team morale.

Have you got a team member who you suspect needs to communicate more? Are you concerned if one member of your team is falling behind the rest? Has one member of your team emerged as a great leader without you realising? You should tailor the questions in your 360 feedback review form to help you investigate this.

Purpose

Always have strategy and purpose for asking each question. Your 360 review questions should all have some beneficial information to help you problem-solve or develop a plan in the future.

Things to ask questions on; motivation, problem solving, interpersonal skills, leadership (if relevant to their role, of course) and efficiency. These are attributes that can shape your workplace.

“At any point have you experienced any difficulties with the level of the _____’s motivation?”

“Are there areas of improvement that you would recommend for _____, to help him/her accomplish their work more effectively?”

Don’t make it too long

Obviously, it all depends on what you would like to know. Research has shown that questionnaires with over 15 questions tend to provide less quality in depth in answers. If your review asks for open expansive answers, I’d recommend 4-8 questions. If it is multiple choice, I’d suggest 9-15 questions.

Be original and specific to your team

You must create your own 360-degree feedback form. It would have been very easy for us to publish templates used by other managers for their teams but the truth is, it wouldn’t help you much. To get great 360 appraisal data you must create your own which is specific to you.

I’ll give an example;

I once worked at a major corporation and had to fill out a 360 feedback form every quarter. It was very obvious that the forms had very little thought put into them – one of the questions was: ‘how would you describe Amy’s leadership skills?’ which is absolutely fine as a question. The problem was… I’d never met anyone in the company called Amy and I had been working there for months.

As an employee, this told me that no effort, honesty, or intimacy was put into creating this questionnaire for me, so why would I want to put effort into giving honest intimate answers?

Employees need to genuinely believe that the answers they’re giving will make a difference and that it isn’t just another pointless task to do.

HR tech

Having the right HR software at your disposal can be a game-changer. Having tools such as; performance management software, goals and performance reviews can make organising and optimising so much easier. Our fully functional HR system will never take the place of the HR professional, but what it will do is save the HR professional time.

Communicate

Before sending out your 360 reviews feel free to interact with your staff beforehand. Make sure they are aware that their reviews will have no devastating consequences. Many employees will give safe answers out of fear of repercussions. Explaining the process, asking for honestly and giving them the assurance that they will not be punished for honesty, can go a long way towards a successful 360 feedback review.

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