Do you know what your people are worth?   by David Klaasen

The relentless pressure on finances is putting a serious strain on all aspects of business. The slow, painful and uncertain crawl out of the longest downturn in living memory means there is less money available to invest in improvements and yet, there is an ongoing demand from staff to increase salaries as they feel the pinch in their personal lives. But what are your staff and managers really worth? How do you go about estimating their value; their contribution to your success?

Last month I ran a Training Course for Managers. They were all people who had worked their way up through the ranks and learned many tough lessons through the school of hard knocks. As we got started many were sitting in the room with arms folded, heads tilted slightly back and a wry sneer on their faces. It reminded me of when I was a chef in the 1980’s and some manager in a suit would come and pontificate about internal and external customer service when all I wanted to do was get back to my 60 litres of consommé before it came to the boil and went cloudy.

It’s not about turgid paperwork
The session was about improving performance and profitability and when I got to the bit where I asked them what they expected to get from the workshop, I could see that they were resigned to a boring lecture telling them that they should sit with their people, fill out some meaningless forms and call it an Appraisal. It was clear that they would rather attempt to dance Swan Lake in a tutu on the X Factor than go through some pointless and convoluted paper exercise with their people, just to fill a few boxes so they can be filed away and never looked at again.

Like with many clients I work with, there were previous attempts to implement an appraisal process with inappropriate paperwork and insufficient training (if any at all) for the managers. It took a while to warm them up but when I said how much I hated unnecessary paperwork and that most appraisal forms were rubbish they began to show interest. When we looked at the real meaning of the word ‘Appraisal’ (according to the concise Oxford Dictionary it means “An estimate of value”), they began to see the process differently. Suddenly it was no longer about turgid paperwork but a way to objectively distinguish and communicate who is contributing to the success of the team and who needs to improve. They began to shift their body language and ask questions. Eventually, I got them to tell me what they saw as the benefits of having a simple and objective way to estimate the value of their people, because it was about making their lives easier not more complicated.

Avoiding complexity
Over the last 25 years I’ve seen many different appraisal forms from beautifully formatted colour-coded 8 page documents at Forte Hotels to complex 10 scale competency frameworks at Business Link. Far too often they are designed by an enthusiastic team of HR people who want to cover every aspect of job core competency, training needs analysis, succession planning and career progression. This is using a sledge hammer to crack a walnut. The interesting thing about these documents is that they never get used because they are far too burdensome and you need a degree in HR to understand them.

I’m no longer surprised that these sorts of documents still end up in Small and Medium sized businesses. It’s often because a Director has the bright idea of doing appraisals and gets a copy of a form from a friend who works in a big corporate. They then try to make sense of it by tweaking it a little and tell the Managers to ‘just get on with it’. This usually causes more damage than if there had been no appraisal at all. Managers hate the process because they don’t understand it and people hate the process because they can feel the manager’s frustration and know that nothing will come of it anyway.

A very simple approach – stick to the FACTs
When I took an overview of all the appraisal documents I’ve ever seen there was definitely a common theme. They were all attempting to give feedback, agree some priorities, communicate how the role fits into the big picture and identify if there is any training required to help the person succeed. That’s about it. There is not much more an appraisal needs to do, especially if you are at the early stages of implementing an appraisal process.

It is easy to remember the purpose and agenda of an appraisal think of it as a FACT based approach:
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