Essay on Performance Appraisal

Evaluation of employees’ skills, growth, and achievements requires a regular review of their job performances and contributions to a company. Performance appraisals give companies such assessments to determine the employees that have contributed most and reward them for their achievement. There are several types of performance appraisals. This essay focuses on the 360-degree feedback method using Bollore Transport and Logistics Company as a reference organization.

The 360-degree feedback is an appraisal method that systematically collects performance data about an organization’s stakeholders such as supervisors, subordinates, suppliers, customers, mentors, and other external raters to measure an employee’s effectiveness, performance, and development. Its process is a loop with a sequence of steps such as planning, organizing a meeting, designing feedback, developing the report, delivering results, reviewing feedback, learning, and follow-up (Siddiqui, 2017). The feedback from these steps comes from multiple sources in the organization. Regarding its instrument of focus, 360-degree feedback is behaviorally based. It measures an employee’s behavioral change in alignment with Bollore objectives, values, and people. Measuring employees’ behavior is preferable to their results. The Bollore Company learns about an employee’s qualities and suitability in performing a particular job. Therefore, 360-degree feedback is a behavior-based performance appraisal method that provides holistic feedback from multiple sources.

The 360-degree feedback is a subjective performance evaluation method that measures intangible employee qualities such as teamwork, leadership effectiveness, and character. This criterion applies a scale ranging from poor to excellent as there is no attachment of numerical scores. The subjective evaluation has several advantages and disadvantages in measuring appraisal effectiveness. The benefits include providing a broader input on employee performance and its applicability in jobs that require personal qualities more than technical proficiency. On its disadvantages, the subjective approach has bias and discrimination according to gender, race, and disability. The application of 360-degree feedback requires the evaluation of these advantages and disadvantages.

Using 360-degree feedback is easy to use because it requires raters to input entries into customized software. Therefore, analyzing the input from the entries yield immediate results. It differentiates high and low-performing individuals using a grading system. The rating scale consists of questionnaires describing employee performance with ranges from 1 to 5. Ensuring the anonymity of raters and the diversity of stakeholders in the survey guarantees the accuracy of this instrument.

There are several advantages and disadvantages of using 360-degree feedback evaluation. The benefits include multiple sources of feedback and identifying development opportunities, whereas its downsides are threats of negative emphasis on receiver performance and inbuilt biases. Since its advantages out-weight the negatives, companies like Bollore transport and logistics use it for evaluating employees.

In conclusion, 360-degree feedback evaluates employees using multiple stakeholders. It is a behavior-based technique that is subjective. Companies like Bollore use it because of its output from numerous feedbacks and identification of development opportunities. However, it has limitations in biases and negative emphasis on participant’s weaknesses.

References

Siddiqui, S. T. (2017). Impact of 360-degree feedback on employee and organization growth: With reference to Higher Education Institutes of Pakistan. International Journal of Advanced Research, 5(4), 27–32. https://doi.org/10.21474/ijar01/3778