The Value of Consistency During Performance Appraisals

It is management's role to make sure they appraise performance based on objectivity and not subjectivity. I have seen so many situations where the latter takes place and once employees come together and compare notes it can become a very volatile situation.

Imagine two employees receiving performance appraisals where both apparently had the same goal and hit that goal only to have one employee rate higher than another employee in that category with the deciding factor being that employees personality.

Management sometimes will play favorites and the performance appraisal becomes a popularity contest. Whom does management like the best? Or maybe one employee has become very adept at working the system so to speak and entices management to give him a higher score.

This creates inconsistency all across the board. Consider a situation where there are no standards of objectivity and all feedback and performance appraisals are done with subjectivity as the standard mode of evaluation.

I once saw this done at a call center. Management would periodically listen in on phone calls of the employees to evaluate the quality of the call. It was largely up to the manager to determine what they felt was a quality call. Employees began to complain when they would handle a phone call in the exact same manner but they would receive a lower score than before because the call was evaluated by a different manager. Sometimes by the same manager but with no objectivity in place even the same manager can give you a different score than in the past.

This problem came to light when all the managers were asked to sit in a listening room and evaluate five phone calls to determine the quality of the call. After wards they had to score or evaluate each call. It turns out the scores ran the gamut from A to Z.

That is when management decided to install a system with more objectivity in hopes of having a more consistent feedback system. That is what it takes to make sure everyone is on the same page, then and only then does it become a win/win situation for everyone involves. This cuts down on the number of challenges to managements appraisal system.