What to expect from your performance appraisal meeting?

It's probably not like a regular day at the office. The clock shows the time as 9:58 am and you need to be in that meet room within 2 minutes to meet your manager. It's your annual Performance Appraisal Meeting!

It may happen once or twice in a year, you may be attending it for the first time or you are already a Pro in facing it. Irrespective of the situation, you must have a few expectations set in your mind before entering that room.

A performance appraisal is a process to evaluate your Job Performance by your employer. Usually, it takes place annually but can happen more frequently as well. The outcome of this career development process is to understand how an employee is performing based on given objectives by the employer.

In this article, we will talk about some of the expectations that are very normal to have from the Performance Appraisal Meeting with your manager.

Getting Feedback

The main purpose of this meeting is to get feedback about your work, productivity, behavior, accomplishments, challenges, etc. You should expect great details of discussions around,

How your accomplishments contributed to the organization's/project's objective?
What are the goals achieved by you and what you couldn't?
What kind of challenges are faced that would have caused some roadblocks in achieving a few of the goals?
How can you be more productive?
How are you doing as a team member to your peers, stakeholders, clients, etc?
Your new skill-building accomplishments and opportunities.
Anything & everything that is specific to you that may impact the project/client/organization.

You can expect these to be documented in a tool so that there is a record of the discussion. It also builds a reference point for you and your employer to go back and validate things in the future.

(Re)Discover your Strengths

You should expect discussions about your strengths. Of course, it is not about physical strengths rather about character, skill, and behavior. What are the strengths that contributed to your accomplishments? This is important to talk about as you may not always realize it by yourself. Talking about your strengths makes you feel confident. It makes you aware of the areas you are good at and continues to build upon.

Plans to Remove Roadblocks

When it comes to strengths, there are weaknesses too. You should expect a conversation about your weaknesses. Your weaknesses are the primary roadblocks to your success, accomplishments, and achievements.

A fulfilling performance appraisal meeting not only discusses the weaknesses but also how to fix them. A plan to remove all possible roadblocks is an ideal topic to discuss. For example,

What kind of soft-skill training may be required.
What kind of environmental changes are needed in the team.
How to change something from legacy to modern.
How to do something differently.

Forward-Looking Goals

A set of forward-looking goals and objectives to be established based on the discussion took place. It is not necessary to set all the required goals in the same meeting though. However, there should be an indication and outline of the areas to focus on, continue, and improve.

Encouragement

You may expect to hear lots of words of encouragement. These are basically to stress the things that you have done better or as expected. It is also important to hear positive words when your weaknesses are being discussed.

However, this may not happen always. Read the next section to understand why!

Reflection of your Self Review

What is a self-review? A self-review is reviewing your work accomplishments, challenges, strengths, weaknesses, yourself. It is important to do prior to the appraisal meeting so that, you have lesser surprises in the meeting. In the best-case scenario, your performance appraisal meeting should be a good reflection of your self-review.

This also depends on how frequently you have a 1-1 meeting or equivalent with your manager. If there is a frequent(monthly, bi-monthly, etc) discussion point, you will not face much of a surprise in the appraisal meeting.

It may create chaos, debate, arguments, discouragement when your self-review and the appraisal reviews are not aligned. It will never be fully matched but they should be aligned with each other.

Hence expect the unexpected if you haven't discussed your career for a while with your manager or never got a chance to think about your self-reviews.

Rating

This is optional. In fact, many organizations do not have a rating system. In case, your employer believes in the rating system, you will get a performance rating based on how your performance was evaluated. You can expect it to match the discussion, feedback you have heard in the meeting.

That's all I have for now. Everything I tried explaining is my experience of hearing from both sides of the table. I'd be curious to know, what do you expect from the performance appraisal meeting? Feel free to comment below with your expectations/experiences.

Next, I am planning a follow-up article explaining how to make an effective and efficient meeting with your manager. Stay tuned.

Before We End...

Hope you find this article insightful and useful. Let’s connect. You can @ me on Twitter (@tapasadhikary) with comments, or feel free to follow.

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