The UAE is among the world’s most developed nations. The government is always encouraging ministries, departments, public offices, and even private sector to adopt to modern technologies. The government also facilitates the technology industry and IT sector with very supportive policies. The economy of the country has proven to be very strong even during the global outbreak, and now that phase is over already, the economy is booming. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the rate of new startups per month is higher than any other neighboring nation. This is raising the competition and making the markets more diverse, dynamic and customer-friendly. As the simplest way to beat the competition is to delight your customers and make them loyal. The customer’ dominance is evident by the rapid adaptation to customer-centric strategies and business models. The tough competition, high customer demands, and ever changing market trends demand businesses to be more proactive with their strategies and policies. This led businesses to start implementing modern technologies and digital solutions to add value and efficiency to internal business processes. The performance management is one of those core processes that need an upgrade.
A well-crafted performance management strategy help businesses maximize their productivity and efficiency and enable them to grow gradually over the time. However, in this modern age of IT and digital the traditional performance management processes have become ineffective, and now a days the modern performance management is heavily relying on performance data. The annual appraisal practice have lost its effectiveness since a long time ago, however, there are still some businesses who rely on that method but most are now implementing modern and continuous performance monitoring methods. It is important to continuously monitor the performance of the employees and keep a track of their progress throughout the entire year. Whether you follow a traditional method or implement a modern digital performance management system, the performance management was never easy. Employees and managers always dread it due to time-consuming processes, unreliable evaluations and appraisals and high cost.
However, all these problems can be solved by implementing the modern technologies. In this blog we will discuss how businesses can leverage modern technologies to drive automation which can significantly improve the employee performance appraisal process.
What is Employee Performance Appraisal Process?
By definition an employee performance appraisal process is a systematic and periodic approach to measure the performance of the employee against their job roles, pre-set goals, the value they add to the company goals and strategic objectives, their worth for the business, their strengths and weaknesses and the future potential. The businesses use performance appraisal processes to acquire valuable information which they can use to make decisions such as employee promotion, bonuses, transfer, and termination, etc. The employee development programs and training programs are also set on the bases of that data. Furthermore the employee appraisal process also help improving communication between the employees and the managers. This is necessary to provide employees with a better understanding of the company goals and objectives and let employee understand how their individual goals and objectives will help business achieving its high-level goals and objectives. The employee performance appraisal data is also helpful in identifying future leaders and help businesses and organizations to gradually improve their talent pool and workforce which is a key to long term success and sustainable growth.
How Automation can improve the Employee Performance Appraisal Process?
There are two major problems that traditional employee performance appraisal process have, first is the bias or favoritism and the second is once or twice a year evaluation. However, in the present day the psyche of a common employee have completely changed, the deep integration of technology, fast-paced lifestyle and evolving markets demand businesses to act swiftly and be more vigilant. The yearly appraisals have become very ineffective. It is not just the employees, the managers, the HR and even the higher management is also unhappy with this yearly or biyearly chore. It is because the time, efforts and cost it takes and in return add very less value to employees’ or organization’s performance. Another major aspect of the modern performance management is that it not just focus on the past performance, but it help identifying the strength and weaknesses of the employees, various internal processes and other factors that are impacting the performance. The modern digital employee performance appraisal process depends on a software application, which automates several performance appraisal tasks, and it also improve the data collection capabilities and the data quality.
Businesses also want to align their employees and all resources with the company goals and strategic objectives. Which is not possible with the traditional employee performance appraisal processes. So the modern employee performance appraisal process is focused on the past performance, current performance and learn the ways to improve the performance in future. A digital employee performance appraisal system/software can help automating several processes of the performance management. Here is how businesses can leverage the automation to improve employee performance appraisal process:
Quicker and More Frequent Feedbacks
The employees don’t like waiting for one year to know how they are performing, in fact they need instant feedback. The yearly performance reviews take a lot of time, employees don’t have much trust on them and the reviews are also not capable of evaluating the entire year’s performance. In fact most of the time the annual reviews are based on just the most recent performances, and they might include some significant incidents where the employee either performed well or poorly. That is why the employee wants more frequent feedbacks from their managers as they know this feedback will help them stay on the course, and will keep them from deviating or losing the focus from the primary objectives. The digital employee performance appraisal system provides an automated and structured communication framework, which includes more frequent interactions with the managers. It help facilitating the one on one discussions/interviews, and more frequent performance reviews. Hence the employee can get more guidance from the managers and tend to perform well.
Streamline Employee Performance Appraisal Processes
The digital employee performance appraisal system is capable of automating several internal performance appraisal processes and performance management tasks. For example, the managers can easily utilize dynamic and customized feedback forms and questionnaires for each job role. The system can understand the workflow and it can automatically take the participants and managers from one stage to the next. Furthermore the system also have in-built features to control the access to the system and various processes and it is also capable of passing the employees or the feedback process to the next level without any human interventions. Thus it saves a lot of manual work. The digital review forms are also a great help, they keep the managers from doing hours and hours of manual work. The digital employee performance appraisal system also help processing the data and offer a variety of in-built analytical tools. It can share the data with all relevant managers, senior management, and even with the employees if needed. All this can be done automatically which save a lot time and effort.
Real-time Monitoring and Visibility to Performance
Processing manual reviews and generating reports is a time consuming task. The managers will have to wait a lot to get the report. This is because the traditional employee performance appraisal system was designed to generate such reports once a year or maximum twice. However, the modern employee performance appraisal system can completely automates the process. As the employee reviews and questionnaires can be digitalized, the system can collect the feedback automatically and instantly generate report in the system. The managers and senior management can easily access those reports from their administrative dashboards. Furthermore the automation enables the digital employee performance appraisal system to provide up-to-date performance data in real-time which can be very handy in decision making and strategy building processes and provide senior management greater visibility and monitoring capabilities. These features also help businesses to quickly adopt to continuous performance management which is tend to be a great and most effective employee performance management and employee performance appraisal strategy.
Save Time, Efforts and Cost on Employee Performance Appraisal Process
The traditional employee performance appraisal process includes a lots of administrative tasks that kept HR and Managers very busy during the evaluation process. AS different job roles have different forms, each employee might have to fill-in more than one form, the businesses tend to evaluate employees, managers, and also collect feedback from teammates and peers, the creation and distribution of all these forms could be very time consuming. Then the HR or the managers will also have to follow up with the employees to get them the form done within the time. Even then it is very less common for the HR to complete the employee performance appraisal process within the due time. It usually gets late and that is due to these time consuming administrative tasks. However, with the help of a digital employee performance appraisal system all these tasks can be fully or partially automated, which means the system will do the work and it can significantly reduce the time and efforts required to complete the process. Furthermore the system doesn’t only save time and efforts but a lot of cost too. The employee performance appraisal system is mostly a web-based application which is very cost efficient.
Align Employees with Company Goals and Objectives
Employees need to be more engaged in their work, they should be happy and satisfied and the communication should be excellent. This will help achieving businesses better performance. A digital employee performance appraisal system not only automates the appraisal and performance management processes but it also provide a structured framework which eliminates a lots of traditional problems and obstacles that can hinder the performance. When the employees are constantly provided with valuable feedback, guidance and mentorship from the managers, they inspired to perform better. The digital employee performance appraisal system also provide businesses with highly accurate performance data that help them understand the strengths and weaknesses of the employees and help them plan better employee development and training programs which itself is a great tool to maximize the employee performance. Furthermore the transparency and proper acknowledgement of all of their efforts help employees to get more emotionally connected with the business and its goals, which also inspire better performance and employee produce more outcome with less inputs.
Well-organized Historical Performance Data
It is difficult to remember the previous performances, milestones or achievements. Especially with manual data management and traditional performance management strategy it is extremely hard to pull out historical data and perform comparative analysis. However, with the digital employee performance appraisal system all the historical data and previous achievements are well-organized and stored in a data repository. It just requires a few clicks in the administrative dashboard to pull up the previous historical performance data. Especially in case of disputes, the historical data help managers and employees to resolve disagreements very quickly and save time. This also help managers pass a fair judgment and increase the transparency of the reviews. Employees are feel more confident and trust when they know the evaluation is fair and on bases of their actual performance. This also eliminates the chances of typical bias and favoritism that is common in traditional employee appraisal methods. The managers can also get the historical data to compare the weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly performance of the employees, teams, departments and even the entire business.
Compatible with Multiple Employee Performance Appraisal Methods
The employee performance appraisal is not a simple method, in fact it have a lot of sub-methods or multiple different approaches to evaluate the performance on the bases of different reference points. A digital employee performance appraisal system can support almost all modern and traditional performance appraisal methods including:
- 360O Degree Reviews and Feedback
- 720O Degree Reviews and Feedback
- Checklist Method
- Critical Incident Method
- General Performance Appraisals
- Field Reviews
- Forced Choice Method
- Management By Objectives (MBO)
- Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS)
- Assessment Center Method
- HR Accounting Method
- Customer/Client Feedback & Reviews
- Performance Tests and Observations
- Performance Rating Scale
- Project based Performance Evaluation Method
Businesses can utilize any or all of the above mentioned employee performance appraisal methods using a digital employee performance appraisal system. The modern day digital performance management systems also provide in-built templates and tools to quickly create performance monitoring mechanisms such as KPIs, OKRs, and other measuring matrices. The HR or the managers can also build customized performance appraisal methods using the in-built tools and features of a digital employee performance appraisal system/software.
See More: 6 Performance Management Problems and How to Solve Them?
Conclusion
For any business or organization monitoring and measuring the performance of their employees and assessing the value they are adding to achieve the company goals and objectives is crucial. It helps them understand the strengths and weaknesses of the employees, let them plan better training and personal development programs for them and help them achieve better productivity and performance which translates to higher profitability and steady growth. However, in this modern fast-paced world, the annual employee performance appraisals are not enough to meet those needs. The ever changing trend, skyrocketing customer demands, and evolving markets demand more proactive strategy from the businesses. The modern digital employee performance appraisal system/software is equipped with tools and features that help automating the appraisal processes and facilitate communication which enable businesses to get higher visibility and align the employees and resources with the high-level business goals and objectives. When the managers clearly communicate the company goals and objectives and provide understanding of how the individual goals, objectives, tasks and performance will impact them, the employee tend to perform better.
When the employees are more emotionally connected with the company goals, their voice is heard, they have trust on the appraisal process and the communication between the managers and the employees is convenient, frequent and clear, the business can easily achieve higher performance. RSI Concepts is a leading performance management system provider in Dubai, UAE we provide tailor-made employee performance appraisal system/software. If you want to learn more about the subject of if you want us to help you deploying a digital employee performance appraisal system, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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