Stop Appraising, Start Coaching

Staff appraisal is an existence-justifying HR procedure devised and administered by HR automata unable to think beyond their own desks, implemented in such a way as to create multiple obstacles to efficient operations in an organisation.  Mandated by HR managers and blindly implemented it is a fine example of the management team being typically the least team-like part of an organisation.

The dreaded staff review or appraisal - dreaded by the appraisers and appraised alike - whether it's conducted annually, quarterly or however often - though a frequent staff review system would push HR's existence-justifying bureaucracy to an extreme that even they might baulk at - is designed as an exercise in bureaucracy, conceived by HR personnel for their own self-serving benefit.  The bureaucratic products of staff appraisals might even be put to some other HR-determined process: allocation of bonuses, determination of salary raises, etc but all hidden behind HR's walls.

The senior echelons of management might even stick their fingers into the HR-mandated appraisal form so that appraisals are "aligned to the business" (or at least pluck phrases from the vacuous mission statement) but with little or no conception of what the appraised staff actually do, let alone whether such an appraisal might help those staff do what they do better or even if they could do things better for the business beyond their asserted (and thus untested) "alignments" to mission statements.

Indeed, no lesser figure than W Edwards Deming listed "Evaluation of performance, merit rating or annual review" as one of his "Seven Deadly Diseases of Western Management"

You might begin to think, dear reader, that I hold something against appraisals or reviews.  Quite to the contrary, for the act of appraising or reviewing against one or more objectives is not an inherently bad thing.  On its own it is neutral, but place it in different contexts and it takes on different properties.  Put it in the context of an exercise that seemingly benefits one party at the expense of another and it becomes a bad thing, at least from the perspective of the party who receives no or a negative benefit (while the one who seemingly benefits may perceive a benefit which in the greater scheme of things is again of no actual benefit).  In contrast, the act of appraising or reviewing against one or more objectives is a fundamental part of the plan-do-check-act cycle, or the inspect and adapt cycle, or any of the other iterative improvement practices.