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Six key mistakes to avoid in your appraisals
Contact White Paper: 01
Are you makingTHESE MISTAKES with your
Performance Appraisals
James Marsh
Head of Consulting, Symposium Events
@jamesmmarshhr

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Introduction
Welcome to your free copy of ‘Are You
Making THESE Mistakes With Your
Performance Appraisals?’
In any organisation, managing the performance
of your staff is a key issue. It’s vital that you create
productive individuals and teams that deliver on their
objectives, but there’s a responsibility here for senior
management or business owners too. It’s all too
easy to fall into the trap of making the most common
mistakes, and this can have a serious impact on
productivity, morale, and ultimately, your bottom line.
At Symposium Consulting, we work with businesses
of all sizes and sectors to help them get the most out
of their staff and manage the performance appraisal
process. Having assisted businesses with creating
the right foundations for HR success for more than
a decade, we’ve learned a lot along the way, and
we know what works and what doesn’t in terms of
performance management.
In this guide, we’ve identified some of the most
common mistakes that managers and business
owners often make when it comes to getting the most
out of their staff and addressing any issues that might
occur. There’s also plenty of inspiration for how you
can make changes and get your business back on the
right track.
Contact us here:
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of their best work, as well as pointers for how they might
be able to develop further.You’ve probably heard about the
SMART model, and it’s particularly applicable when looking at
employee performance. Staff should leave the meeting with an
action plan that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic,
and Time-bound.
On a practical level, there are a few ways that you can ensure
that this is happening within your organisation. It’s all about
having the buy-in of your line managers, and giving them
the time and the skills to carry out effective performance
discussions. On top of this, they also need the right tools.
Could you provide them with templates that they can use so
they fully understand the process? How can you make better
use of technology to make it easier and less time-consuming?
Make sure that they fully understand exactly why these
discussions are so important for your business, too.They need
to know that you’re not imposing more work on them simple for
the sake of it, and that the result will be more productive teams
Having vague conversations
about performance
Performance appraisals should involve a
thorough assessment of an individual’s
contributions over a specific period of time.They
should involve discussion of strengths, particular
projects or tasks that went especially well, and
areas for improvement for the future, based on
evidence. In reality though, this doesn’t always
happen.You’ll often find that line managers have
been asked several times by the HR department
to get their performance appraisals done, and
end up having a rushed conversation during
which employees are told that ‘they’re doing fine’.
From here though, how can employees take away
valuable information and practical insight into how
they can progress and continue to add value to
the organisation in the best way possible?
It’s those SMART objectives again
The answer is, they really can’t. Conversations
about performance should be very specific,
and it’s vital that employees are given examples
1

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Viewing it as a
tick-box exercise
A lot of the time, organisations do have a performance
management strategy in place.They’ll have forms that need
to be filled in, a policy on the company intranet, and they’ll pay
occasional lip service to talking about how important it is to the
organisation. In practice though, it’s all too often seen by line
managers as just another task to tick off the list.
Performance management does inevitably
involve completing paperwork, and some
chasing up by the HR department to
ensure that everything is completed before
the deadline.What you need to consider
here is the culture within your business,
and just how important the process of
managing and improving performance
is seen by your management teams and
your staff.A change in culture is something
that can’t happen overnight, but with
commitment from the senior leadership
team, it can happen.
2

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Being fooled by ‘the
recency effect’3
The recency effect is a psychological term that describes when
we look at the most recent actions or behaviours of a person
when assessing their characteristics or performance.Think
about it like this – if a member of staff has recently completed
an exceptional piece of work, you’re much more likely to base
your discussions around this when it comes to performance
meetings. Similarly, an employee might have consistently
performed well over the course of a year, but made important
mistakes in a recent assignment.The overall impact here is
that the discussions aren’t particularly fair, as they don’t look at
the whole picture.
Regular Check Ups
So what can you do to overcome this? Firstly, it’s important that
performance reviews are carried out on a regular basis. If they
only happen once a year within your business, it’s inevitable
that they won’t assess the full picture.While formal reviews are
important, organisations that manage to embed a culture of
improving performance within their businesses are the ones
that thrive. Remember that informal discussions
between managers and their staff should happen
on a regular basis, and can be far more useful in
the longer term.Though performance should be
backed up with paperwork, it’s the sentiment that
matters the most.
Similarly, it pays to encourage your staff to always
be mindful that performance is integral to the
business, and to keep records where necessary.
If performance discussions are scheduled to
happen every three months, suggest that they
keep a diary that documents their team’s projects,
assignments, and developments. Looking back
on it will be extremely useful once the meetings
start to come round.
Keep track of performance
with the online appraisal
management system from
BespokeHR and receive
two months free with
the Symposium partner
discount!
http://www.symposium-
events.co.uk/bespoke-hr-
appraisal-system/

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Not giving your staff the support
they need to improve4
It goes without saying that sometimes, members of staff will fall
below their targets. It’s easy to think that this means that they
need to be reprimanded, but the issue is often much bigger
than this.
Why did the problem occur in the first place? Are individuals
given the training and support they need to do their jobs well?
Could there be other factors in your workplace that are having
a negative impact? Are your induction processes missing out
important points? Are you looking for the wrong skills and traits
during your recruitment processes, and how could you improve
these in the future? As you can see, there are so many things
that need to be addressed before placing the blame with the
individual employee.

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Not being truthful
about performance5
Some managers are natural people pleasers, and can’t
resist playing ‘Mr. Nice Guy’.Whilst such skills are sometimes
necessary within a business, they don’t pay when it comes
to performance. Often, issues can easily be fixed if they’re
nipped in the bud, if honest conversations are had and
improvement plans or necessary training can be arranged. If
an individual doesn’t know that their performance isn’t living
up to expectation, they can’t be expected to make changes.
The problems can get deeper, and it becomes harder to do
anything about it.
Here, again, it all comes down to giving your line
managers the right tools, and improving their
capabilities. Of course, there are techniques
for delivering less than favourable feedback.
Discussions should always involve talking about
positive aspects and staff’s strengths, as well
as their points for improvement.They should be
constructive. Rather than just delivering the news
that certain areas of their performance aren’t up
to scratch, there should be a mutual agreement
about the next steps, including any support that
might be needed in the form of training.Truthful
conversations are undoubtedly tricky, but they’re
an important and indispensible part of effective

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Not following up
This comes back to the mistake of making performance
appraisals a box ticking exercise that gets rolled out in
your business once a year.What often happens is that the
discussions are carried out and the forms are filled in, but
nothing happens until twelve months down the line when the
process is due to be carried out again.
In appraisals, there should be agreements
about development activities, and
objectives should be mapped out for the
short, medium, and longer term.Therefore
it makes sense that these should be
assessed regularly. If real progress is to be
made, goals should be at the top of mind,
for line managers and their teams alike.
6

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A final note
About Symposium
I hope that you’ve found this guide useful, and that it’s given
you plenty of pointers to identify where you might be making
mistakes, and where you can implement changes to improve
the productivity and performance of your workforce.
If you feel like performance appraisals are becoming a
real issue in your business, or you’re keen to lay the right
foundations for making the performance management
process integral to your operations, it pays to bring in some
professional expertise. Our experienced HR consultants, can
help with any aspect of the process, whether it’s new policy
creation, integration with your business objectives and values,
or simply advice on how to handle a complex case.
For further information, give me a call on 020 7253 0615, send
an email to jmarsh@symposium-events.co.uk or visit
http://www.symposium-events.co.uk/hr-consulting/
At Symposium we have worked with hundreds of HR
specialists over more than a decade, delivering the knowledge
to HR professionals from organisations of all sizes in both
the public and private sector that can help them make a real
difference. We can field the right individual or team for your
project from both our in-house personnel and our expert panel
of independent consultants and specialists. We understand that
your unique project requires a unique team to craft a tailored
solution that’s right for your business.
Our consultants can help you and your organisation with your
people strategy, HR support, employee wellbeing and change
management. They bring with them decades of experience
across the entire HR spectrum. Our aim is to deliver the HR
knowledge you need; no more, no less.
In addition to consulting, Symposium is also the leading
independent provider of HR conferences, training workshops
and webinars.
Find out more at www.symposium-events.co.uk
Finally, if you’ve found this guide helpful,
please recommend it to any of your contacts
who might be looking at how to manage
performance within their businesses.
Wishing you every success,
James Marsh
Head of HR Consulting

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