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.