It’s that time of year again! Appraisals can blight a company. Productivity slows, people panic, the bureaucrats take over and there’s occasional slaughter.

The need to appraise and review is essential and no amount of on-the-job informal assessment can do as much as a good, objective, open and honest stock-taking of how someone’s doing.

So why do so many completely banal, academic and frankly pointless appraisals happen? Why do so many appraisees leave their appraisal having given the impression that they found it invaluable, only to go back to their desks and wonder how an hour could possibly have been less productively spent?

There are woeful mistakes being made and opportunities missed but, if the basics were appropriately adopted, these could make the world of difference.

This is the sort of rubbish that pervades personnel records:- Marketing Manager, publishing company, Objective: to contribute and advance the strategic direction of the company, adding qualitative and quantitative input to the departmental remit; Operational Controller, cellular telecoms company, Personal Target: To attain improvements in levels of self-motivation and to more constructively deliver beyond the specific tasks within the core job description.

Appraising is a skill that verges on an art. It requires subtlety, great interpersonal skills and sometimes more unusual steps to get it right.

Get HR in. Sometimes it will do more harm than good, but do you really know how well the appraisers are doing? An HR professional can lend a qualified, objective viewpoint and make the appraisee understand that the company really wants to help.

There are some stunningly inept parts in many appraisals. Such navel gazing as, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years time?’ puts the discussion on a hypothetical plane that dilutes the real impact. Summaries must be written in clear, direct and achievable ways. As a rule of thumb, an appraisee should be able to read the summary once and know where they’re going without having to refer to it again. Which is good, because they rarely do.

Take soundings, i.e. gentle questioning of those inside and outside the company with whom the subject interacts, is vital. Care must be taken in how much of this research is revealed but, if done properly, not only will the session be more rounded, the individual will leave feeling that their role and contributions are really understood.

Encourage the appraisee to talk from the start, avoiding the likelihood that they will temper their opinions having heard the boss’s verdict.

Divorce from the financial. Although financial reviews often coincide with appraisals, they should always be divorced from them. Make it clear that the session is about them and their role, otherwise all the individual will think about throughout is what numbers are coming at the end.

Appraise the appraisal system. If you are reading this and think that your company’s system is perfect then you don’t know what’s really going on.