We are overloaded with information in a fast-moving era. We must focus and prioritize in order to succeed. In order to accomplish our goals, we have to prioritize and avoid setting too many goals at once. Focus on the goals set and understand the responsibilities that contribute to the company growth.

  • Don’t set too many goals: With too many goals, employee can’t see where they are and feel that they missed the clear direction. By taking too many goals, manager may be micromanaging how the employee will achieve the goals rather than setting overall goals for his or her performance.
  • Focus on the Goals: Focus on what you need the employees to accomplish. If you communicate the goals clearly, the employees are likely to surprise you with their astonishing performance.
  • Don’t set high goals: Setting goals that are too high to reach will deflate your employees. At the same time, if there are no goals set, it may turn off your employee’s challenge to work.
  • Align employee goals with company goals: When employees understand how their individual role and responsibilities contribute to organizational growth, they're often more focused and motivated to achieve goals that result in success for both the business and themselves.
Available for discussion and feedback
Trust and help your employee to set up their goals and keep their goals realistic. Be available for feedback, discussion, and coaching. Ensure the employee knows what is expected of their performance. Describe exactly what you are looking for from the employee and help them to enhance their skills. As a manager, you are responsible for the achievement of the goals.

Keeping everyone aligned to work towards the same goals within the organization is a big task on hand. Everyone involved will have to understand and commit to the goals set in the given time frame within which they should be achieved.

Step 1: Write them down
Assign goals to your team and have them logged into the Performance Appraisal system, which allows them to set, track and review their progress. Employees can be more motivated and accountable for what they’re working on.

Step 2: Making goals that are realistic
Making goals that are realistic to ensure that the employee knows what is expected of their performance so that the employee is clear and able to achieve by a specific time frame. 

Step3: Set deadline
Set deadline for employee to submit progress update. With this thought process in place, it means that you can successfully implement a team goal and have everyone align and focused on it. They will latch onto the time and task at hand even when busy or preoccupied with other activities.

Step 4: Be SMART
Setting SMART Goals is a great way to ensure your team has a clear guideline to follow, ensures everyone is on the same page and that there is no doubt about how to work towards completing either individual or team goals.
  • Specific: Create goals that are clear and specific enough to be useful. Avoid vagueness.
  • Measurable: Identify goal that is measurable and meaningful so that progress can be tracked and motivating for the employee.
  • Assignable: The goal should be attainable by someone who can realistically take on the role or work.
  • Relevant: The goal must align with organizational goal and be worthwhile to the employee.
  • Timely: Have a realistic time frame in which they can meet the goal on time.
Now, you’re ready to set goals for your team. Be a SMART person with SMART goals, you will be on the way to success!
Goal setting is one of the most important things you need to have in your performance appraisal system. It is the first step in your performance appraisal system and an effective way to achieve success, exploit your full potential at work. Why it’s important to set goals for work?

Avoid Vagueness and to be specific
Help your employee to set up their goals and keep their goals realistic. Ensure the employee knows clearly what is expected of their performance and avoid vagueness. Describe exactly what you are looking for from the employee, monitor their progress and achievements in a specific time frame.

It helps us prioritize and organize
When we have clear established goals, we are able to prioritize and organize our work better. Goals remind us of what we have decided that is important to us.

It helps to measure our progress
Setting goals involves specificity; it allows us to monitor and measure our progress. It makes it easy to see if we are following through our plan.

Give us Focus
By setting goals, we are able to focus on what is important to us. It reminds us what we need to concentrate on. It gives us a clear direction that will help us reach our desired destination and prevents us from getting lost and wasting of time and effort.

It builds confidence
Many people lack the confidence to pursue their goals so they do not even try. When we prioritize, we can focus on what is important. It builds confidence, as you recognize your own ability and competence in achieving the goals that you’ve set. Confidence gives you the power to keep moving forward.

It provides motivation
The wonderful thing about setting goals is that it is highly motivational. When we set goals, it clearly states our intentions and commitment to achieve them. It creates accountability and motivates us for the accomplishments. It motivates us to stay on track by reminding us of what is important to us.

It saves us time
When we have well-defined goals, having a clear direction helps us get to our desired destination. It helps to prevent us from losing our way and wasting precious time. 

It keeps us accountable
When we set clear and specific goals that are measurable, it keeps us accountable for our actions. There is no doubt of what we are doing because we know exactly what needs to be done. It encourages us to commit to the maximum of our goals.

It is clear that goal setting is beneficial in many ways. It is of key importance to implement goals in the organization combined with all the reasons stated above. You can have a productive, motivated and high-achieving team on the way to success!


Motivated and engaged employees have higher employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction leads to enthusiasm in their role and overall company growth in the form of higher retention, increased employee loyalty, improved efficiencies and increased profitability.

Benefit: Higher employee satisfaction
Employee satisfaction is the key in any company. When employees feel satisfied; they engage in their work with their position. They feel a greater connection to the company, and therefore they are more likely to produce quality work which will benefit the company as well as the customer.

Benefit: Increased Employee Loyalty
Employee who feels valued is more productive and loyal to their employers. To increase employee loyalty, company must decrease the negative emotion and increase the positive emotions at work. This will help to have a healthy employee turnover rate.

Benefit: Improved efficiencies/higher productivity
Engaged employees work more efficiently and harder for the company. They feel a sense of responsibility to putting effort on their work if they are treated well by their manager. They are more productive than others if they are interested in and connected to what they are doing.

Benefit: Increased employee retention and lower turnover
The hiring and on-boarding process for new employee is costly and time-consuming. Engaged employees can reduce staff turnover rates.

Benefit: Increased profitability
The engaged employee goes beyond the basic job responsibility to delight the customers and drive the business forward. When employees feel good at work, they work harder and produce quality work. Therefore, engaged employees lead to happy Customers and increased profitability for the company.

Better engagement means better performance. The more engaged your employees are with your performance management process, the more your organization will reap its benefits. Don’t just go through the motion of rating performance, setting goals and identifying development plans. When done well, employee performance appraisals can be an invaluable tool for driving employee engagement.


Employee engagement is the key factor for achieving high performance. Hiring the right people in the right position is the key to successful business. However employee retention becomes another challenge for the company. Once a year appraisals are ineffective, when employees have different expectations in their work environment. If you want to keep your employee happy and satisfied at work, these are some ways of how we can improve engagement at work.

How: Communication
Lack of communication will lead to unhappiness in the workplace. Instead of having performance appraisal once a year, managers should make this a regular exercise. Manager and employee can get together to discuss performance goal and development to strengthen the relationship.

Communication lets employees have a chance to provide input to the manager and vice versa, manager to employees. They can share the difficulty, problem or issues when on their job. This action will support employee in their performance, development and help to ensure that the employee is part of the organisation.

How: Growth and development
Training is a key to engaged employees. Let employees have a chance to familiarise with the job function and environment. Invest the time and effort to nurture your employees and help them grow.

When you focus on continuous improvement and development on your employee, you create a positive atmosphere that encourages learning. They definitely will stay with you for long.


How: Recognition & Appreciation/Focus on good performance
Recognition and appreciation is one of the leading factors contributing to employee satisfaction and motivation in your workplace. Positive feedback lets your employees know that their hard work is valued and appreciated.


How do we define Employee Engagement?

Having an employee that seemhappy” does not equal to having employee engagement.

Employee engagement is when one is fully involved in, and is enthusiastic about their work towards their organization and its values. Employee engagement is actually the level of enthusiasm and dedication an employee feels toward their job. Engaged employees go the extra mile to contribute to the success of your company.

Engaged employees are emotionally committed to the success of their work to the company. They concentrate on the goals of the company and are willing to go “the extra mile” for the organization‘s success.

With engaged employees, companies lower the risk of turnover, boost customer satisfaction, increase employee loyalty and well being as well as increase profitability of the company.

Excel is a very useful tool for certain purposes, but not for employee Performance Appraisal. It is inefficient and time-consuming to use excel for your employee Performance Appraisal.

In this article, let us look at why using excel is a bad idea for employee Performance Appraisal.


1. Flexibility
a) not scalable
When data grows with the organization, managing huge data on excel is not a good idea. It is difficult to handle huge amounts of data in excel if your work involves multiple departments or divisions, and working with teams. This task is a big challenge with the use of excel.

b) It’s difficult to share
Excel is not suitable for collaborative initiatives as there is no central database with real-time accurate information. It’s difficult to share a spreadsheet among many team members because the data could be accidentally deleted or changed. You can only send email to notify your employee of the change but you cannot be sure that your employee has received and seen your feedback. It is an inefficient way to share your feedback for performance appraisal.


2. Non-standardised
Regardless of how templates are set up, one single standardized template that ensures that the entire spreadsheet is exactly the same is impossible. Spreadsheets can take a highly diverse form based on employees experience, skills and ability to solve problems.

3. Managing Data Quality
a) Prone to human errors
It’s easy to make errors when "cutting and pasting" from each source sheet into your spreadsheet. As data gets collected, there may be several versions of the spreadsheet (from different sources) and this increases mistakes made.

b) Loss of historical data
Spreadsheets are not designed to store historical data. When one of the team members updates the data, the historical data will be lost. This makes it hard or impossible to spot trends over time and compare data across longer time horizons.

c) Data Security
There is no secure data aside from creating a password for the spreadsheet while you’re dealing with sensitive information. If spreadsheets that have many formulas are deleted or edited, there is no check to verify the accuracy of the data source being pulled into the spreadsheet.


4. No Mobility
Files are not stored in a centralised location. Staff have to access to the files only when they back at the office. It is difficult to track status using the tiny columns and accessing huge files on mobile devices when an employee is outside the office.

5. Difficult to analyze
Spreadsheets can be difficult to analyze. The volume of data presented can lead to misinterpretation

Automate your performance appraisal with minimal effort and time required easily!

 

An effective performance appraisal system plays a crucial role in managing performance in an organization. It works towards the improvement of the overall organizational performance by managing the performance of team and individuals for the achievement of overall organization objective and goals.

Understanding the benefits of performance appraisal can help an organization make the best use of them.


Improved organizational productivity and performance
Improving organizational performance is one of the most important reasons for an organization to have a performance appraisal system. Goals and objective of an organization offer to communicate expectation to the team and assess how well each member is doing. When everyone is clear on the expectation and problems faced, this will result in an overall improvement in organization success.

Training and Development
Performance evaluations keep a record of employee’s strengths and weaknesses in conjunction with their job specifications. By reviewing the evaluation data, identifying the necessary training and development plan, the employee will be able to close the gap between current performance and desired performance.

Cost savings
An automated staff performance review will help the manager on the staff development. Managers will have more time to focus on developing people instead of filling or writing performance reviews. Company can save cost on paper, ink, postage and other supplies that support a paper–heavy office.

Improving Communication
Communications should be kept open and face-to-face so that employees are also encouraged to provide their own feedback about the performance expectations. Managers are always busy with day-to-day responsibilities and often neglect the necessary communication with employees. Smarter Appraisal solution provides an opportunity for manger and employee to sit down and discuss performance review.

Reporting Analytics
Performance appraisal system allows you to access a variety of data analytics. Manager can analyze employee performance instantly by generating real time reports anytime. Intuitive chart for comparison of employee appraisal results by year and monitoring performance across the organization can be easily generated. Data can be used to improve the quality of the workforce and to monitor the effectiveness of changes in recruitment strategies for the new hires.

An effective performance appraisal system plays a crucial role in managing the performance in an organization to ensure the achievement of the overall organizational ambitions and goals.

 

Performance appraisal is to review and evaluate the performance of individual on the job. It is the process of measuring the improvement of employee performance. Employees set goals and explore job growth to strive for at the next appraisal review.


Performance improvement
Performance review system manages employee review process to align goals with company objectives and track the individual employee's progress. By providing feedback to the employees, employees can understand their contribution to the company's success, increase employee productivity and performance. During the performance review, the employee can clarify expectations with their manager on the areas for improvement, and in turn their contribution for company success.

Training and Development
Performance appraisal is a tool to determine necessary steps to help employee in improving their skills and competencies they need to acquire to make a greater contribution to the company. Skills and development on personality, attitude, and behavior of the employee is necessary for the career development to pave their way to a successful and stable career. As a result of this, they also increase their chances of promotion and reduce the chance of layoffs.

Promotion and motivation
Performance appraisal provides employees with recognition for their work efforts over the year. In turn, reward, encouragement, and compensation are given to employees accordingly.

A good performance appraisal system works towards the performance of the individual, and the overall organizational ambitions and goals.