What are the sources of performance appraisal errors and what preventive measures can be taken?

Reprint the following information for reference:

1, recent effect: because the impression formed by recent events becomes the basis for judgment.

2. Halo effect: also known as "halo effect", it is a tendency to evaluate employees according to their vague impression of one or several aspects of their personality characteristics.

3. "Almost like me". It is a trend in performance management to give higher evaluation to employees who are similar to themselves.

4. The center is often wrong. Managers have a tendency to avoid evaluating them at both ends of the scale, even if their performance is indeed distributed at both ends. The first possibility is lack of self-confidence, or fear of offending others and affecting enthusiasm.

5. Too strict or tolerant. Some evaluators are too tolerant, while others are too critical.

How to avoid it is mainly in the following aspects.

1, with clear purpose

2. Choose an appropriate evaluation method.

3, performance management as a "system"

4. Promote the change of behavior habits

5. Leadership's attention

6. Continuous improvement

7. Play the role of supervisor

For most enterprises, a very important goal of performance appraisal is to distinguish high-performance employees from low-performance employees. However, no matter what assessment methods are adopted, such as KPI, MBO or balanced scorecard, there will be various errors, which are difficult for human resource managers to overcome.

In fact, before the performance appraisal, HR supervisor had better ask himself: "What do I want this person to do?" Let the employee know clearly what kind of effort he or she should achieve. This sounds simple, but it is not easy to implement. The measurement standard of human resources department tends to put all employees on medium performance. If the supervisor evaluates an employee's poor performance, there will be a lot of trouble, and the corporate culture of the company is actually based on seniority rather than performance, which makes the performance appraisal of the enterprise have to deviate from the goals of different performance.

There is such a joke that five porters move the round table together, and the phenomenon of "three monks have no water to eat" appears again, which needs to be assessed. First, it is unfair to check whether you sweat after working for a period of time; Re-examine the expression in the process, it turns out that some people are very good at acting, and they grin at every turn, which means they don't contribute and are unfair; Finally, everyone wears a pair of gloves when exercising, and there are pressure sensors at the fingertips, so that everyone can be evaluated completely and objectively.

Error types of performance evaluation

However, no matter what methods are used and the information collected from what channels, there may be errors in performance appraisal. In order to make the performance score fair and explain the performance evaluation, managers are required to know what kind of distortion usually occurs.

Ego-like error (rater's personal bias)

Personal differences (mainly refers to age, gender, physical characteristics, family or economic background, attitude, etc.). Due to some similarities with the raters themselves, the grading results may deviate from their actual work performance to some extent. When filling in the evaluation questionnaire, raters tend to be inclined to some raters due to some emotional factors. This situation generally appears in the assessment that is difficult to quantify, especially in the assessment of ability and attitude.

Distribution error

Graders tend to use only a part of the scale-low score, high score or middle part. Sometimes a group of employees do equally well (or poorly). However, giving similar scores to all members of a group cannot accurately describe performance, but is a distribution error. When raters give high marks to all employees by mistake, this error is called loose error. When raters demand employees with unreasonably high standards and wrongly give all employees low marks, the resulting error is called strict error. Give each employee a similar "average score", or all employees are in the middle of the score. This situation is called the intermediate trend.

These mistakes have brought two problems. First of all, it is difficult to distinguish two employees who are graded by the same person. If employees seem to have the same level of work, it will be more difficult to make decisions on promotion and work arrangement. Secondly, to compare the performance of employees evaluated by different raters, these errors will cause problems. If one rater is relaxed and the other is strict, the employees evaluated by the latter will get much less rewards than those evaluated by the former. In this way, the reward is not linked with actual performance, but with some degree of error.

Aura and horn effect

Halo effect means that you have a high evaluation of one performance factor of your subordinates, which will lead you to have a high evaluation of all other performance factors of this person. Graders usually can't distinguish between different aspects of performance. For example, when IT companies recruit software developers, one developer has good expressive ability and the other has poor expressive ability, so that the former seems to know more about technology. In this example, the evaluator can easily confuse communication skills with knowledge skills.

On the contrary, when raters respond to a negative aspect and give employees low marks in other aspects, this prejudice is called horn effect. For example, if an employee sometimes procrastinates, the evaluator will think that this is a sign of his lack of motivation, ambition and inability to perform his duties.

The evaluation standard of job performance is not clear.

Ambiguity of job performance evaluation criteria is one of the common reasons for the failure of job performance evaluation. If you don't use some descriptive language to define the elements of performance appraisal, but adopt an open explanation, it will make raters have a completely different understanding and may lead to unfair evaluation. For example, different supervisors may interpret performance standards such as "good" and "average" very differently. If we use some descriptive language to define it clearly, it will make the evaluation more coherent and facilitate the evaluator to explain the evaluation results.

How to avoid mistakes

To avoid mistakes, we need to pay attention to the following aspects:

First of all, make sure you have a clear understanding of the problems that are easy to appear in the above performance appraisal, so that you can take effective measures to avoid these problems.

C is the production director of an electronics company. He always tries to help his subordinates. It's the end of the year, and it's time for assessment. C looked at the assessment form and felt a little embarrassed.

W usually does not perform well in all aspects of his work. In the past six months, he has often asked for leave, and her husband is seriously ill. Not long ago, my son contracted pneumonia and is still in the hospital, which is undoubtedly worse for W, who is heavily in debt. According to her actual work performance, the assessment level will definitely be much lower than others. Considering that the generous bonus can temporarily alleviate W's predicament, C chose "excellent" in the assessment grade.

X is skilled in business, good at asking questions and has a good brain, but sometimes he "has a whim" and simplifies some work. Considering the cultivation prospect of X, W gave X a "good".

Although old Y works hard, it is not easy to work in the company all his life. He will retire next spring. Giving him an "excellent" is also his intention to the first teacher.

Xiao Z, a graduate student, has just been here for more than a year, and his positive performance is outstanding, which is well received by his colleagues. However, the number of outstanding places is limited, and it has been given to W and Y. Because L is still young, there will be many opportunities in the future. Be wronged first and give it a "good".

The biggest deficiency of director C's above assessment is that he did not reflect the difference of personal performance from the performance assessment results. Due to some subjective judgments of appraisers, performance evaluation is improperly linked to other affairs. The final assessment result is inevitably unfair, which does not distinguish between high-performance employees and low-performance employees, and also deviates from the overall performance assessment goal of the enterprise. As far as W is concerned, the company can give whatever help it can in life, but it should not affect the normal performance appraisal. If we help W by lowering the performance appraisal standard, W will certainly benefit, but it will certainly make other employees with good performance be treated unfairly, thus affecting their work enthusiasm. C should explain W's difficulties to the company leaders and apply for other forms of help. For L, we should give an objective performance evaluation to ensure that the backbone of the company's benefits can be properly encouraged and rewarded, and should not be affected by other factors. Other employees can also conduct similar analysis.

For the errors caused by different examiners' different scoring standards, the author thinks that enterprises can adopt the method of mixing graphic scale evaluation tools with other performance evaluation tools. Correctly using the icon degree evaluation method can clarify the performance evaluation standard. Appraisers can list a grade description on the performance evaluation form and give a clear definition of the corresponding grade boundary.

For example, the level of a production enterprise is divided into six levels:

1. excellent: outstanding in all aspects, and obviously much better than others;

2. Very good: in most aspects of work performance, it obviously exceeds the requirements of the position. The work performance is of high quality and has been so during the evaluation period; 3. Good: it is a competent and reliable work performance level, which meets the requirements of work performance standards;

4. Need to improve: there are defects in one aspect of performance and need to be improved;

5. Dissatisfaction: Generally speaking, the level of job performance is unacceptable and must be improved immediately. Employees whose performance appraisal level is at this level cannot get a salary increase;

6. No evaluation: there are no available standards in the performance registration form or the time is too short to draw a conclusion.

The above methods are also suitable for solving some problems in self-similarity error to some extent. At the same time, pay attention to multi-person evaluation and unify standards.

The key to avoid the halo and horn effect is that the evaluator should be aware of this problem himself. Secondly, strengthening the training of supervisors will also help to avoid this problem.

Secondly, choose the appropriate performance appraisal tools.

At present, various commonly used evaluation tools include: drawing scale evaluation method, alternating arrangement method, forced step method, pipe fitting event method, behavior anchor evaluation method, target management method, mixed method and so on. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and enterprises can use different tools according to their own situation, so I won't go into details here. The mixed method is a widely used and effective evaluation method in China.

In addition, training can reduce the evaluation error.

Method 1: Train examiners how to avoid the above evaluation errors. First of all, the speaker showed several videos specially designed for examiners to induce them to make specific scoring errors. After grading, examiners discuss their grading decisions together and how related mistakes affect their decisions. The training plan provides some tips so that they can avoid these mistakes. For example, if the trainee evaluates all the evaluation factors of employees (such as work quality and work quantity) at the same level, then the speaker may point out that the evaluator made a halo effect mistake, analyze them one by one, and then give the correct evaluation results.

Method 2: around the complex characteristics of employee performance, help evaluators learn how to observe many performance aspects that deserve their attention. They should study practical examples, all aspects of academic performance, and the standards in these aspects. The goal of this training is to help raters evaluate employees' performance more comprehensively and accurately.

Other factors: the correlation between performance appraisal results and wages, the level of employee turnover, the intensity of time constraints, the requirements for fairness in performance appraisal, political behavior in performance appraisal, etc. , will affect the performance appraisal to a certain extent. To solve these problems, we need to adjust and design according to the enterprise's own situation and the objectives of enterprise strategy and performance appraisal. The author believes that clearly defining the performance appraisal standard is the basis of performance appraisal, and the purpose that should be followed is to clarify what kind of performance level you want your subordinates to achieve, that is, how to define the work. For example, what you want your sales manager to do is: everyone should protect the three biggest customers of the department and complete the sales of 800 thousand yuan; Keep a happy sales team, so that customers will not come back to complain to the administrative staff. In order to make these sales managers work in the way you want, you'd better determine a measurable and accurate performance evaluation standard. The "personal sales" activity can be measured by the total sales he or she has completed alone. "Keeping a happy sales team" can be measured by the turnover rate of sales staff. And "keeping customers away from executives" can be measured by "no customers complain to executives" or "no more than 10 per year".

Performance appraisal is not only a tool to evaluate employees' work, but also an important basis for enterprises to formulate salary, which is very important for employees' development and motivation. Performance appraisal can provide you with an opportunity to feedback the degree of work completion to your subordinates, which is exactly what employees need to know. And you can work out a performance improvement plan that both parties understand and accept. Therefore, in the process of assessment, taking some necessary measures to avoid mistakes is of great benefit to the realization of enterprise assessment objectives and even the strategic objectives of the whole organization.