How Can We Effectively Implement Performance Appraisals for Remote Employees?

Hello Members,

I would really appreciate it if you could help me out with this.

Ours is an IT firm. Out of 50 employees, 35 are placed at the client's end. Their superiors or the reporting authority are someone from the client's end itself. Our employees have always been requesting us to introduce a Performance Appraisal System in the organization. Their reason behind this was to receive timely increments. We have now introduced the concept of Performance Appraisal in the organization. We have created the forms, sent them to all the employees, and received the filled forms back. However, we are facing a few problems:

1) As they are not well trained in filling out the forms, they have marked 5 out of 5 for all the attributes.

2) Since their immediate supervisor does not work with us, we cannot receive his daily reports or ask them to appraise him according to our norms.

3) As he is at the client's location, which is not the same city as our office, it is not possible to have a face-to-face discussion with him.

4) No matter what we try to do, it is very difficult for us to satisfy them with their ratings.

Please guide me on what to do.

Regards,

Richa

Hi,

The first thing is to provide training to employees and their supervisors on the PMS (rating, assessing, etc). I don't know how big your organization is, but if you can make this PMS available online, it would solve the problem if the appraiser and appraisee are not in the same city. Have a system that can be accessed online from anywhere in India or outside. However, HR needs to track whether it is being done on time and ensure fairness.

I hope this information could be of some help to you.

Regards,
Anshu

Hello Richa. Your primary problem is not technological. Putting your performance management system online will not solve your problems. Your problems stem from you organizational structure and your performance management method and process. These are things that you need to fix first before you do anything else:
1. You have people called “supervisors” in the clients' organizations that are not really supervising your staff.
2. You are asking employees to self-appraise their performance with the hope of getting objective appraisals.
You can start by getting some basic information on how to set up an employee performance management system at http://www.businessperform.com/html/...anagement.html
Les Allan
Business Performance P/L - Managing for Performance
http://www.businessperform.com