Professor Emeritus, Founder Vice Chancellor, Amity University Haryana, Manesar, Gurgaon-122 413
Online published on 15 March, 2019.
No organisation can flourish, even survive, in the absence of periodic evaluation of the performance of its employees. It is so because good performance is vital not only for the economic health of an organisation but also for the personal growth and welfare of employees. It is unfortunate that despite the great significance the performance appraisal enjoys, the experts have not been able to evolve any standard method for appraising the performance of employees. Hence, different industrial organizations, whether small, medium or large, use different methods/practices of employee performance evaluation and also keep switching over from one to another method/practice to suit their requirement. It may be due to great variance in the organisations’ size, nature, status, complexities involved, etc. and also due to their strengths and weaknesses.
For example, while some organizations, specially the smaller ones, follow casual, unsystematic and often haphazard methods, some other organizations follow traditional and highly systematic appraisal methods like straight ranking method or paired comparison technique or man-to-man comparison method, and some follow grading method or graphic rating scale method or checklist method or forced choice description method. There are some other organizations which follow critical incident method or descriptive method or point system (it is quite common and popular as well) or field review method. However, due to various practical difficulties involved in the aforesaid methods, a good number of organizations are switching over to modern methods of performance evaluation which include 360 Degree Technique (it is being used by a good number of organizations), management by objective, behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS), assessment centers, human resource accounting, self-evaluation and the like.
In the present paper, an attempt has been made to identify the latest employee performance appraisal techniques being adopted in big organizations, especially in the IT and ITeS sector as these have started abandoning the performance evaluation methods used by them earlier and now switching over to new techniques. For example, Wipro, TCS, Deloitte and Infosys have given up “bell curve” appraisal and switching over to new techniques which underscore the importance of collaborative behaviour and bring teams together to work towards common goals. Some companies are building new platforms. For example, HCL Technologies has one called iSuccess, Wipro’s is called Performance Next, Infosys has put in place a new incentive structure called iCount, IBM has recently adopted the Checkpoint model, Accenture has shifted to performance achievement, and so on.
Some of the recent innovation’s in appraisals also include Axis Banks, Enhancement Programme, Deloittee India’s Reinventing Performance Management (RPM), Persistent’s assessing performance objectively with the help of clear goals and measurable KRAs, etc. Organisations like Book My Show, KPMG, RPG Enterprises, IBM, HCL Infosystem have initiated instant appraisals or surprise appraisals. Anyway, there is a lack of uniformity across different organizations.
Besides, most employees in most of the organizations are unhappy with their performance reviews, as has been revealed by TimesJobs survey reported in The Economic Times of December 01, 2015.
The paper concludes that keeping in view the variations in the size, nature, status, complexities, etc. of the industrial organizations, it does not appear feasible to work out a standard method of performance appraisal that can be applied uniformly across industrial organizations in our country. New techniques are being evolved and used by some big organizations but the uniformity is still missing. It may be hoped that experts and researchers may invent a technique of performance appraisal which may have some room for minor deviations to meet requirement of an individual organisation and, therefore, may be usable by one and all. Similar is the case with performance reviews.
