Do Annual Performance Evaluations Really Help an Employee?
Monday, October 09, 2006 I have been wrestling with performance evaluations for years. They have changed very little. No matter if a company is small or large; evaluations follow the same arcane formula. Sometimes they are tied into annual salary increases, so the better your evaluation, the bigger the raise the following year. Is this a model that really benefits an employee as much companies tout? Or, is it a clever way to control expense under the guise of “performance pay.” There are some things to think about. Here is the typical scenario. It is the end of the fiscal year and HR is hounding managers to turn in performance evaluations by a certain date. Managers often do not schedule adequate time to perform the reviews with their employees. They become somewhat like a mechanical exercise fraught with incomplete information and errors. For some managers, it is a time when they feel empowered to dump on an employee. After an entire year of no feedback, the employee learns that his p
