Struggling to Motivate Employees After Appraisals? Seeking Advice on Boosting Morale

Hi Seniors,

I am working in a small IT company as an HR executive. It is very difficult to motivate employees after performance appraisals. Could you please share some suggestions to deal with this situation?

Thank you.

Keep talking to them, counsel them. The biggest issue is employees comparing their increment with others. This is the primary issue in all companies.

This cannot be handled by HR alone. This has to be collectively handled by both HR and the Technical Head/Manager. When sharing appraisal feedback, the Technical Manager has to positively explain to the employee where they need to improve and the reasons for the rating/score.

After the appraisal, HR has to counsel the employees, provide them with a broader picture of their future in the company, and explain that increments cannot be the same for everyone, etc. Effective counseling may reduce murmuring and grievances, but it cannot be fully eradicated.

Hello there,

As simple guidelines before appraisals, many of your employees might not have the same salaries. They might be hired based on experience, education, or other reasons, but they all do the same job. If an employee comes to you asking about an appraisal and compares their salary with X's, ask them a straightforward question: do they enjoy the benefit of a higher salary than him or her for this year? Let them enjoy the same for this year. Moreover, we aim to achieve equality in salary for everyone. Therefore, for those with lower salaries compared to others, we have provided a significant hike, while for those with average salaries, we have given a lower hike to maintain consistency.

Employees may not heed your words as mentioned above, but they believe the appraisal occurred not due to poor performance or negative feedback from seniors. At least, it gives them a positive outlook on their work.

Thank you.

Counseling by HR on Post-Appraisal Grievances

Counseling by HR on post-appraisal grievances, in the absence of well-defined job responsibilities, key result areas, and a near-objective performance evaluation system fairly linked with salary raises, is a futile task. You need to put a very robust performance management system in place to minimize the issues arising from it. I can imagine your plight caused by perhaps the current arbitrary and subjective performance evaluation practice. Please work towards putting a proper performance management system.

Regards, Vinayak Nagarkar HR Consultant

Dear Anonymous,

Please provide more details of the scenario, such as whether you have job descriptions, if the appraisal included self-assessment by the staff against their job descriptions, the mode of your appraisal system, and whether you have been able to assess the cause of demotivation. This information will help our experts provide a well-considered view rather than offering suggestions based on assumptions.

Thank you.

Dear Colleagues,

The Performance Appraisal System is an annual process. You may improve the engagement level of all employees after PMS by adopting the following:

1. Counseling sessions with the concerned employees
2. Use a strong online grievance handling system
3. Talk with them with data in the presence of their managers
4. It must be a time-bound process, not open-ended, and generate a record for future reference

Regards,