Performance appraisals, and reward & recognition programs

    Organizational performance is dependent on individual performances of the employees. Due to biasness or some rating errors, employees get inaccurate ratings in their performance evaluations. Types of errors/effects and biasness are described in detail in the below. Minimizing the errors will bring employee satisfaction, motivation to work as well as the performance improvement  (Javidmehr and Ebrahimpour, 2015)   Strictness or Leniency Depending on the rater, employees might get lower rating or a higher rating than the deserved rating. The superior employees will get affected due to strictness as they are getting a lower rating than the expected. Due to leniency, all the subordinates will get a higher rating than the expected but consequently superior subordinates might get demotivated. The Forced distribution like grading on a curve, or modern appraisal techniques can be used to minimize the Strictness-Leniency bias as those techniques are result oriented and ab...

       The Reward and Recognition are employee motivational factors those influence and direct the employee behaviors to achieve the targets and goals (Danish and Usman, 2010). The efficiency and the productivity of an organization can be improved through a well-designed reward and recognition mechanism (Akafo and Boateng, 2015).      Reward is an incentive which is given in return for an accomplishment of a task/goal. Bonuses, promotions, gift certificates, flowers are examples of rewards. Recognition is how the employees are publicly valued for their contributions for the company. Positive feedback, appreciations, encouragements are samples for recognition (Zeb, Rehman, Saeed and Ullah, 2014). ‘Employee-of-the-month’ and ‘Lunch-with-the-CEO’ are also the recognition programs ( Akafo and Boateng, 2015)   Total Reward Management      Total Rewards concept had been developed since early 1990s, but a Total Rewards Model was first unve...

Performance appraisals are used to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the employees in an organization (Aggarwal and Thakur, 2013). Mutually agreed goals are more effective than the pre-defined goals for an employee. The mutually agreed goals which are driven by the business strategy are the most effective for performance appraisal (Lawler III, Benson and McDermott, 2012). The goal setting should be done using the SMART technique (“Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Targeted”) to increase the effectiveness of the performance appraisals (Cappelli and Conyon, 2018) According to Rothwell, Lindholm, Yarrish and Zaballero (2012), dilemmas in performance appraisals include: Uncomfortable Time-consuming Not specific, general comments Ratings inflated Sends false message of success Creates false superiority Limits future development Hard to defend in court According to Russell, J. and Russell, L. (2009), dilemmas of the performance appraisals can be mitigated by refr...

  Even though the performance appraisal methods are criticized often, no one has suggested any other process that can provide feedback, develop motivation, identify training needs, and justify the reward (Prowse, P. and Prowse, J., 2009). The research by Lawler III, Benson and McDermott (2012) shows that performance appraisal can be effective if they are properly designed and conducted. A properly designed performance review can be used as a tool to improve the employee performance and organizational performance (Bacal, 2004).   Literature reviews have identified plenty of benefits and applications in performance appraisal process (Rothwell, Lindholm, Yarrish and Zaballero, 2012 ; Bacal, 2004; Russell, J. and Russell, L., 2009).  Benefits of performance appraisal include, Enhance employee commitment. Provide employee feedback on performance. Build the self-confidence. T he appraisers get to know the strengths and weaknesses of the appraisees. Job role and the existenc...

As per my experience a leading media services organization in Sri Lanka is having a good performance management system and a reward & recognition program. At the begging of a year, the supervisor and the subordinates will have a one-to-one formal discussion to set the individual targets for the year those are driven by the company strategy. For an example for the year 2022, one of the company strategies is to automate all the processes i.e “zero manuals”. So, all the relevant employees have a goal related to automation for the year 2022. The employees will update the finalized goals in a web-based performance management tool which will be approved by the immediate supervisor and verified by the skipped supervisor and then the HR division. HR team will trigger monthly check-ins in the system to update the progress of the goals to be approved and verified by the supervisor and skipped supervisor. The supervisor can provide feedback through the system. After 6 months HR team will tr...