Performance Evaluation

Appropriate professional in office (Formality)

A company supports a formalized system of performance evaluation of all employees. The purpose of the evaluation is to provide feedback to employees about their work performance; assist employees in staff and professional development; identify employees' leadership qualities; and achieve the company's goals. Therefore it is should be done seriously to ensure that the right objectives are tested.

In this case, being a director in sales, Danny is supposed to be more supportive, enthusiastic in doing the performance appraisal with staffs, make it a point to look professional while conducting it. He thinks that conducting the appraisal at king's park is good as it is more casual for employees, but he did not put that into aspect that a change of environment might make the employee very uncomfortable and that it will cause them to be nervous and affect their performance. Another issue is at such a open space like the park, there might be unexpected situations and there are different factor affecting the appraisal. If the weather is really hot, both director and employees might not be feeling comfortable and both rater might give a non accurate rating and employee might behave differently from normal. Another example is, if the director is a flower lover and admires the flowers in the park, and he finds out that the employee hates the natural environment and flowers, it will unconsciously create a bad impression in the rater's mind even though this has nothing to do with work performance. It will create unconscious bias and that will cause rater to view the employee with colored glasses in his performance. That will be a negative effect. Thus, performance appraisal should be done in formal, stable and familiar environment so that less unexpected things will happen and affect the performance appraisal process.

Subjectivity

Non-data-based assessment -- most processes rely 100% on the memory of those completing the assessment because pre-populating the forms with data to inform decisions would be too difficult (cynicism). In addition, most assessment criteria are "fuzzy" and subjective. Director do not write in down in formal documents, feels that it is better but data collected will not be 100% recorded as human memory has limits too.

High anxiety -- because the process is so subjective and no benchmark performance numbers are set in advance, uncertainty can cause many employees high levels of anxiety weeks before the process. In this case, manager said that in the interview that sometimes he will give them some appraisal with surprise managers apart from him. That is actually not beneficial for the employee being appraised. They might not be confortable with that idea and due to the shockness and anxiety, do not perform as expected. Therefore, the appraisal