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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 seem “happy” 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.

Technology saves you a lot of time. There is no need to wait for response or feedback overnight. Unlike in the past, you can access the system any time if you have forgotten to bring certain important documents from home. Technology lets you access all the information from a single storage place and share with your colleagues. With technology, you can save time and allow for more time to grow your business.

Here is the breakdown of how technology saves your time.

Computers
Appraisal forms that the manager uploads to the system can be shares with all employees. Alternatively, the manager can select the employees to evaluate by sending an email to them. Appraisal results gathered from employees are stored online. Managers can easily generate real-time reports and analyze data. You do not need to consolidate the results manually to produce a report. The report is readily available on a click, so you can quickly see a breakdown in the visual reports. You can even export appraisal reports to excel for meeting and discussion purposes easily.

Web-based solution/Cloud Hosting/Internet
Appraisal results and information are backed up/stored in the cloud-base system. You do not have to manually search through thousands of files to obtain employee information. You can easily access to your employee appraisal’s information by pressing some keys and the information can be shared instantly.

Employees can do away with pen and paper filling of forms when the forms are stored in the shared location. Evaluation forms are in web-based form builder with predefined templates. Employees can create and submit the form via web-based Staff performance appraisal system.

Mobile
Employees can update their performance appraisal when they are out of office. All appraisal forms are stored online and syncs with your mobile device and desktop. You do not have to go back and forth to access your performance appraisal information. You can access using the mobile or tablet device anywhere you go.

Click here to check how Smarter Appraisal can help you manage your Appraisal process.

It is easy to maintain day-to-day activities in the early stage of your business. But once your business grows, you will need to think about long term strategic planning. This is especially so if you take on more staff and departments in your organization.

Today’s competitive manufacturing environment requires continuous improvement in productivity, quality and efficiency. There is a need to look towards automation to improve on your manufacturing and human resource needs. Smarter Appraisal helps you implement the best-practice performance review that drives employee performance, development, engagement and retention.

Organization Alignment
Automated performance appraisal allows you to track organizational and departmental goals and make them easily accessible to employees. The system allows monitoring progress on goals, making sure you have the right talent supporting your organization. This process ensures that employees in your organisation sets and achieves effective goals.

Benefits: Increase employee engagement, drive higher performance

Goals Settings

Create Goals

Clarifying role and expectations
Everyone has assigned duties on their job. But not all employees can get clear output from their duties. Competencies/job skills describe how work should be done by employees. This process provides clarity of the expectations, responsibilities and functions to be performed by the employees.

Benefits: improving the efficiency of recruitment process, develop the skills you need in current workforce and accurate measurement of employee’s job performance.

Competency List

Score comparison

Training and development needs
Manufacturing industry requires highly-specialized skills and experienced employees. By setting goals for employees and communicating required competencies, Smarter Appraisal allows managers to better identify performance, build high-performing and skilled workforce required. Automating your employee evaluation process allows you to identify critical skill gaps between current performance and desired performance.

Benefits: identify your high potential employees, retain your top employees and increase chances of promotion.

Gap Analysis

Top performer

Every industry faces unique challenges in performance appraisal. Finding and retaining the right skills of a good employee is a challenge. It will continue to be a burden to the manufacturing industry. To optimize the efficiency of your manufacturing process, you have to optimize the quality of your employees. Performance appraisal system is one of the solutions to automation and optimizing your employee performance appraisal process.

Take the first step and start building your workforce today with Smarter Appraisal.

After the financial crisis in 2007, banks have been trying to manage cost better, deepen relationship with customers and enhance product and services. These are some of the factors for banks to re-examine and improve the way in which they measure and report business performance. Financial services provider, customer service is a very touch point whether you are in bank, credit union, lender or insurance. So you have to inspire your team with the automation performance review to resolve the dissatisfied clients, business opportunities and revenue.

Goal alignment
Increase employee engagement and the bottom line of your business. Ensure staff from all levels, i.e., bank teller, customer service, insurance broker and HR, etc are aligned on the business objectives and development plans. This way, everyone in the organization can achieve effective goals.

Engage and retain key talent
Performance appraisal helps to retain talented individuals who affects the productivity of the organization. Keep staff engaged and motivated with recognition on their performance and career progression to ensure they stay focused on winning clients’ business.

Build talent pool
Compare the final result with the expected result and where you may have talent gaps. Identify top performers and monitor performance across the organization with competency, skill, experience. This insight will help you to respond to changes, seize business opportunities and build your talent pool.

Save HR time
Web-based solution with real-time status or progress monitoring save time, costs and administration paperwork. Employees can focus more on delivering stellar customer services.

Performance appraisal is the technique to evaluate and measure employees’ contributions to the organization, the employee's achievements, skills and growth. Employee performance is documented and evaluated with its own performance standards.

Methods of appraisal have been classified differently by different authors. Widely used appraisal methods can be classified into two categories: traditional methods and modern methods. Traditional methods are based on the perspective or opinion of the raters. It’s emphasis is on the rating of the individual’s personality traits. Modern methods focus on the evaluation of work results, job achievements, and are more objective.

Common performance evaluation methods widely used in today’s organization:

Rating scale

Critical incidents

Management by objectives (MBO)

360 degree feedback

Which method is your organization using?

Performance appraisal is to review and evaluate the performance of employees over a given period of time. It is the process of measuring productivity and improving employee performance as well as determining employee developmental needs. Explore employee job growth and set goals to strive for next appraisal review.

Evaluation

Evaluation is the review and assessment of employee’s job performance on efforts they have made and what they have achieved. The information will likely play a part when making employment decisions on promotions, salary increases, bonuses, and training.

Providing feedback

Providing feedback to the employees regarding their performance, so that they know how well they have done will help them to improve in the future.

Measure performance accurately

The Performance criteria has to be set to help in accurate measurement of employee’s job performance. The company's goals can be achieved only with the effort of employees.

Clarifying role and expectations

Everyone is given duties on their job. But not all employees can get clear output from their duties. The Manager should communicate with the employees to provide clarity of the expectations, responsibilities and functions to be performed by the employees.

Identify area of weakness

Everyone has their weakness and may not be an "all-rounder". Performance appraisal process helps in identifying the weakness of the employee.

Training and development needs

To help turn the weakness into a strength, the manager has to be responsible for providing training. This will help improve staff performance and knowledge.

Other purposes of performance appraisal:

provide career path and goals setting

determine employee promotion

decide salary increments and bonuses

decide retention and termination of employees

to reduce the grievances of employee

strengthen the relationship and communication

evaluate effectiveness of human resource management functions

motivating superior/manager performance

Motivate superior/manager performance and

improve decision-making ability

What are you planning for 2017? What are the preparations and steps needed for a smooth process in your performance reviews?

#Tips for your effective performance review.

1. Preparation
Start your company’s goal and job description for the employee. Gather information about your employee‘s performance throughout the year.

Schedule meeting with your employee for the review in advanced, So that you don’t have to rush for the time to conduct the review. Private and quite location is advised for the meeting.

2. Goal setting
Help your employee to set up their goals and keep their goals realistic. Ensure the employee knows what is expected of his or her performance. Describe exactly what you are looking for from the employee and help them to enhance their skills.

Setting goals high will deflate your employee and without goals, will turn off your employee challenge of work.

3. Reviews
Discuss quarterly on employee positive performance and areas for improvement regularly, hence your employee knows what to focus on and able to perform better on the task given my manager.

4. Feedback
Feedback is an important part of the review process. Allow your employee to feedbacks and gather information on what they need from you. Constructive feedbacks provided for the coming year and clarify expectations.

5. No Surprises
Avoid surprises during your performance review. Summarize the purpose of the review and avoid giving negative feedback. Always encourage employee to respond to your feedback at the performance review.

6. Stay positive
Spend more time on positive aspects rather that blaming. Your employee will find motivating and rewarding.

7. Future plan
Build a better relationship with your employees by telling them what they good at, what they could have performed better and how to improve for the next performance cycle.

Technology today has slowly transformed overflowing files cabinets into an organized digital format. Companies are going paperless as a savvy business decision to improve productivity, reduce cost, improve security and help the environment.

Here are some of the reasons why your business should go paperless. Let the transition help you improve and add value to your business.

Improved Efficiency and Productivity / Time Savings
Going Paperless improves the productivity and efficiency of an office. All important information and documents can be covered digitally. You can back up or store them online. You do not have to search through thousands of files to obtain the information. Simply press CTRL + F to find and information can be shared instantly.

Improves Security
Storing and backing up documents on cloud hosting provider eliminates the need to carry sensitive documents out of the office. All access to the system is encrypted using SSL. Appraisal records are accessed base on the roles and organization hierarchy.

Save Money
A paperless office obviously buys less paper. Think about how much you spend each month on paper, ink, postage and other supplies that support a paper-heavy office.

Save Space
Space that is used to store all the physical supplies and actual documents can be condensed into two gigabytes of neatly organized file on a hard drive.

Go Green
Going paperless is an environmentally conscious decision. By transforming your organization into a paperless organization, you can save trees and forests while you save money on paper, ink, postage and other supplies at the same time. Do your part to save the environment!

Accuracy
Automation of performance appraisal means spending less time on data input and increasing your data accuracy levels by reducing human errors. Errors in paper form data entry can be due to errors in handwriting or misinterpretation. Automated workflow makes processes faster, easier to handle and more accurate.

#Did you know?
A tree can produce 17 reams of paper on average and takes about 100 years to grow. A ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees. 17 reams of paper release 110 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Everyone plays an important role in a company. Everyone in the company has the responsibility to participate and get involved in this process in order to make the business a success. The involvement of the stakeholder’s group include executive, manager, HR and employee.

Executive (Management)
Executive (Management) plays a lead in the process acting as role models for the company. Your responsibility is to ensure the company has the talent and skills needed for business success.

You need to ensure the organization’s goals and mission are aligned and reinforced with every employee for maximizing employee satisfaction and productivity.

Finally, Executive has to provide effective business decisions about the company.

Manager (Supervisor)
Managers (Supervisors) have to provide leadership from the goals set by the Executives (Management). They have the responsibility to support employee development and career progression.

The managers have to check regularly with employees on their progress on goals, provide coaching and assistance to achieve goals. Reviews have to be done regularly in a two-way discussion throughout the year instead of an annual review. What is also important is to deliver positive and constructive feedback during one-on-one meetings.

HR
The role of HR in this performance management process is to design the best practice performance management process with reasonable deadlines for completing each step of the process. Hence, HR can save time on automating the performance management process and focus on talent strategy.

HR should look at training and coaching for all levels of staff in the performance management process. They should analyze and review the results and recommend areas of improvement. HR should play an impartial role in the performance management process and look at the overall performance of each person in the company.

Employee
The entire performance appraisal process revolves around employees in the company. Employees have to work towards achieving individual goals as well as help the organization reach its goals and objectives.

Each person has to take care of their career development plan, be open to feedback and take the initiative to improve their performance.

Every employee needs to complete the self-appraisal with goals, competencies, and expectations, completing them during the specified deadline. Be honest about your performance and the ratings you have given to yourself!

Best with Staff Performance Review Software

Smarter Appraisal offers a multi-featured web-based staff appraisal solution. Automate your time-consuming process of designing, administrating and consolidating staff performance appraisals.

We help you to align employee goals with the business goals for a productive workforce. We have a built-in 360-degree feedback system that you can easily add questions and rating scales.

With Smarter Appraisal, you can regularly review an employee’s performance so that your organization can achieve a high level of employee engagement and meet the organization goals.

Our solution supports approval routing across multi-level reporting structure. The appraisal templates can be tailored to suit various staff designations and seniority levels.

All data is stored online. You can access the data from anywhere. Simply log on to our web-based solution to create, track and review the goals of your organization anytime.

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