The Way of HR: How to Ensure the Fairness of Performance Appraisal

For performance appraisal to be effective, it is necessary to diagnose the human resources of the enterprise in the early stage, conduct human resource analysis, make correct evaluation and analysis of department positions, and be fair, just and open.

The loss of fairness in performance appraisal will dampen the enthusiasm of employees, and is not conducive to encouraging employees to do their jobs creatively and with high quality and excess quantity. In serious cases, it will mislead the enterprise in employment decisions and lead to reverse distribution; in contrast, performance appraisal Ensuring fairness can motivate employees, eliminate resistance, improve team collaboration, and help companies make correct human resource decisions, reduce labor costs, and increase productivity. However, performance appraisal operations are often goal-oriented. When applied to individuals, differences in objective conditions such as region will have a great impact on their performance appraisal results, which makes performance appraisal unfair.

As a management system, in addition to performance appraisal, performance management also includes important interconnected and interlocking contents such as performance planning, performance communication, performance feedback and performance supervision. To make performance appraisal effective, Effectiveness must depend on the good operation of the entire performance management system. In this management system, the core is performance appraisal, that is, how to obtain employee appraisal results accurately and effectively. The key is to solve the problem of unfair performance appraisal. It is easy to say but difficult to do.

Enterprises should make it clear that the design of performance appraisal indicators is a process of gradual improvement. The quantification of indicators should also be gradually increased with the improvement of internal management of the enterprise. Especially for small and medium-sized enterprises or companies that have just started, because at this stage the company mainly focuses on sales, the objective internal management capabilities are not enough to support the acquisition of too many quantitative indicator data, so it is not a simple matter to achieve more quantitative indicators. Something that can have immediate results. From the perspective of quantification of assessment indicators alone, assessment indicators should be designed in stages according to the actual situation of the enterprise, especially the cost of data acquisition, and should be gradually improved as internal management capabilities improve. There is no need to overly demand that everything be done in one step. And no matter what stage the enterprise is in, it may involve quantitative issues of qualitative indicators. There are two ways to solve this problem, direct and indirect. In actual business operations, these two methods can be used jointly.

The direct solution is to use the standard description method for qualitative indicators, that is, to describe the scoring standards of qualitative indicators according to four levels: excellent, good, medium, and poor, and clearly define the scoring basis for each level. There should not be too many levels, generally 4 is appropriate, otherwise it will increase the difficulty of standard definition, but it should not be too few, otherwise the "quantitative effect" will not be achieved. Each level can correspond to a score segment or a fixed score. When describing the scoring criteria, you should be as specific and accurate as possible, and gradually improve these criteria as the company develops, so that qualitative indicators can be gradually "quantified."

The indirect solution is suitable for qualitative indicators that cannot be "quantified" well, and performance management methods can be added to make up for the lack of quantification of indicators. These methods mainly include: requiring the appraiser to write down the reasons for the scoring results, especially the indicators evaluated as "excellent", or requiring the appraiser to conduct performance appraisal communication with the appraisee and fill in a performance communication record form to supervise the progress of the performance appraisal. Fairness; you can also increase the management of performance appraisal grievances, encourage employees to grievances, etc. To a certain extent, these means can remind assessors to take assessment scores seriously, especially the evaluation of qualitative indicators.

In reality, in order to avoid the phenomenon of “high” or “medium” assessment results, many companies adopt a variety of management methods. The more common ones are as follows:

1. Forced distribution method. There are many methods for this, including proportional forced distribution, such as normal distribution; quantitative forced distribution, which stipulates the number of people for each assessment level; or a combination of the two. ?

Force the scoring results to widen the gap. That is to say, for the same indicator or different people being assessed, the scoring results must be spread out to avoid excessive concentration of scores or basically no difference. ?

2. Fixed scoring method. That is, several levels of excellent, good, medium, and poor are designed for qualitative indicators. Each level corresponds to a fixed score, and scores other than the fixed score are not allowed. For example, "excellent" corresponds to 100 points, and "good" corresponds to 80 points. Therefore, when scoring, only 100 points or 80 points can be given according to the actual situation of the person being assessed. This design avoids too much artificiality on the one hand. Interference, on the other hand, can also forcefully widen the gap between scores. ?

Each enterprise uses these management methods, and each method has its advantages and disadvantages. However, after in-depth research, for companies with a small number of quantitative indicators or a relatively low weight of quantitative indicators, using the forced distribution method is a relatively better method among many methods, but the key is how to "force".

In terms of advantages, the forced distribution method can not only better avoid the "higher" or "middle" phenomenon in assessment, but also control the company's labor costs. Here, it should be noted that the forced distribution method does not have to be designed strictly in accordance with the normal distribution. Enterprises can do it according to their own needs.

Of course, the forced distribution method also has its disadvantages, that is, it mandates the proportion or number of people with high scores, which itself is unfair. However, forced distribution has many advantages that are worthy of enterprise attention.

In addition to widening the gap in assessment results and effectively controlling labor costs, the key is to guide assessors to take assessment seriously and make assessment more effective. Due to the requirement of forced distribution, how many people should be given high scores and who should be given high scores will become a question before the assessor. Therefore, this requires the assessor to take each assessee seriously and try to give a fair assessment. evaluate. In this way, after a long period of implementation, the assessors will develop the habit of "treating the assessment rigorously" to a certain extent. Over time, unfair factors will gradually reduce, and at this time, the forced distribution method can "retreat to the second line." , no need to use it. Therefore, overall, the forced distribution method has more advantages than disadvantages and can be the first choice for enterprises.

? As a difficulty in human resources management, the fairness of performance appraisal has always been questioned. However, there is no absolute justice in the world. The performance appraisal system itself has limitations that cannot be completely eliminated. The inherent flaws of the performance appraisal system will eventually affect the objectivity and fairness of the appraisal results. Of course, we cannot abandon performance appraisal because of choking. On the contrary, we should explore the assessment system suitable for the time based on studying the current situation of the company, and constantly improve it according to the company's development stage and time changes, give full play to the positive effects of performance appraisal, and try to ensure the fairness of performance appraisal. , rather than pursuing perfection too much.