Are appraisals important? Yes they are. 86% of respondents said they are either important or very important. Do they make any difference to performance? Well, not much. 86% said their performance improves a little or not at all. So what's going on in appraisals?

The fact that most companies today have an appraisal process is a really positive shift. As is the widespread acceptance that your manager cannot know the whole story about how good you are at your job, hence making some kind of 360 degree feedback essential.

But think about the following typical scenario. Jim Smith is filling in a 360 questionnaire on his boss and he has a number of things going on in his mind. Firstly he's had a lot of these to fill in because everyone in his department is doing them. He's pleased it's an electronic version of the questionnaire as he can dash it off quite quickly. Secondly there is a rating scale for a number of dimensions and Jim is thinking, "Well Bob has got things he can improve on but he's not a bad chap. He does try and I don't want to drop him in it. After all this could well feed into his pay review." For some of the rating scales he's thinking, "Well in some respects he's a 2 but then last week he was being a 6. I'll average it out and put 4."

Last month a business director showed me the feedback from his 360 degree feedback questionnaire, beautifully graphed and laid out with averaged scores from a number of people he works with. "I've got this" he said, "but what does it mean? It really isn't much use to me" And at the same time his HR director was telling me, "We're not ready in this business for face to face feedback."

Here's another common story: Mary takes over a new team and is keen to develop her team so she spends time early on reading up on their recent appraisals. Then when she meets the team members she is surprised to find that they are nothing like the description in their appraisals. It's not easy to be direct and honest when you are committing something to paper which you know will be held in the vaults of HR for years to come. People have a sense of fairness and responsibility to each other and are naturally tentative in what they write in appraisals. Many HR managers observe what they call "upward drift", where it seems that everyone is average or above. Surely it's statistically impossible for everyone to be average or above?

In our research we asked a cross section of people "What changes would you like to see to your appraisal process?" The most popular answer, (38%), was "more frank and honest feedback"!

The other pattern I observe in organisations is that appraisal feels like a paper exercise. HR need to drive it hard to ensure managers carry out the process and complete the forms. Our survey results reinforced the suggestion that for many people appraisal is simply a paper exercise. We asked people "After your appraisal, do you ever refer to your competed appraisal form again?" 41% said hardly ever or never.

Therefore we were not surprised that less than two thirds of the people surveyed felt that they were always honest and 35% admitted they were less than honest in their own appraisal out of a desire to keep their boss happy. It's easy to see how the layers and layers of holding back the truth give a very misleading picture about what's going on in an organisation.

So, by now you are probably thinking, "Well that's all well and good but what other options are there?" I firmly believe that the only way to make feedback processes positive and performance enhancing is to place on the ownership on the individual receiving the feedback and to make it a conversation not a survey. In our experience this creates a situation where the individual really encourages the feedback and is open to it. This in turn encourages those giving feedback to be more honest. The fact that it is a conversation not a form filling exercise generates far more honest feedback. As I tell my colleague that I find her difficult to work with, I can see whether her facial expression is indicating curiosity, surprise, resentfulness or agreement. And I know whether I want to say more as a result. It also allows my colleague to say that she doesn't find me so easy to work with either. This acknowledges the reality that it's our relationship that needs attention, not just one or other of us!

If you would like to know more about our research and how you can supplement your appraisal processes with some real organisational truth telling, see e.g. the well

Frances Storr
© sheppardmoscow 2005

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