Advantages & Disadvantages of Electronic Performance Appraisals

The performance appraisal is a way for managers to point out the good traits and bad traits of employees, help employees work on areas that need improvement and work with the employee to set goals for career development. With the business world getting increasingly competitive, some companies are finding it difficult to find time for one-on-one appraisals and have turned to electronic performance appraisals instead. When you remove that personal interaction between manager and employee you need to be prepared for potential consequences.

An electronic performance appraisal system saves time in several ways. One is the ability for the employee and manager to fill in their portions of the evaluation when they can, as opposed to scheduling a meeting to discuss the evaluation. Another way is that an electronic evaluation system can collect metric data throughout the year and use a formula created by the human resources department to come up with a performance evaluation number. This can all be done instantly without the manager needing to take time to compile reports.

An electronic appraisal system can be used to make sure that all appraisals are seen by the appropriate parties. That increases the efficiency of the workflow appraisals. Instead of a stack of appraisals sitting on a manager's desk waiting for review, they can be part of a file that the manager can review at leisure. Once the immediate manager is done with the appraisals, they move on to the next person who needs to see them. This helps to improve the time to get employees raises and put promotions into effect.

One of the important parts of an appraisal that the electronic system removes is personal interaction between employees and managers. When all parties are filling out online forms rather than discussing the employee's performance, it can be difficult to create a career plan for the employee or to work on a program to fix the deficiencies in their performance.

Employees take their evaluations seriously because a good evaluation can potentially lead to a raise or promotion. Even employees properly trained on how to use and electronic appraisal system can make mistakes. Without human interaction at each level of the appraisal process these mistakes can remain in a report indefinitely potentially costing the employee advancement in the company.