The Annual Performance Appraisal System

I have been attending HR conferences or speaking with HR professionals about their approaches for many years, and I frequently get the sinking feeling that I have heard everything being presented 100 times before. One in ten presentations will stimulate me and allow me to discover something really new: Wow, that company has broken new ground. That’s courageous. Respect. In some cases, it is the nature of the HR community to gear themselves around the practices of others. It creates an element of security. HR managers at SMEs in particular rarely have sparring partners on the same level as them at their company. So it’s no wonder that, to a certain extent, people try to achieve what others have already attempted. Science also tends to lag behind practice, rather than provide groundbreaking inspiration. Many consultancy companies have for years been adopting the same old HR approaches at a wide range of businesses. This increases their own security and sense of routine, and yields the desired profit margin. Given this rather unfortunate state of affairs, the only choice is for the HR world to very definitively gear itself around a few, barely distinguishable best practices. Although companies may differ in the manner in which they conduct their annual performance appraisals, there is a prototype variant approximating practice as a whole. If we look at what random businesses are doing in terms of the annual performance appraisal, it may come as a surprise to see how similar the approaches are. It thus seems appropriate to start with the traditional annual performance appraisal described below.