A Perpetual Pain - In More Ways Than One - Performance Appraisals

Posted 11:07 AM by Michael Fox

As an employment lawyer who makes his living defending employers in adversary proceedings, performance appraisals are my worst nightmares. All too often there is a noticeable lack of correlation between what a manager tells you about a recently terminated employee and the employee you would expect to see based on their file of performance appraisals. At a minimum you are likely to be forced to deal with a long history of "meets requirements", which of course begs the question, at least in a jury's mind, of why it became necessary to terminate some one for performance who, after all, was meeting requirements.

As a supervisor of younger lawyers and staff people, and thus someone who is on occasion required to do performance appraisals, I can identify with all the reasons that performance appraisals turn out wishy-washy and not as good as they should be. So I am always keen for a better way to do them, or even just insights on how they might be made better. That was my frame of mind when I stumbled over an article on MindSolve's website talking about their patented Visual Profiler. While knowing nothing more about it other than what I read on the referenced link, it did seem intriguing. If nothing else, their comments on the benefits of comparative rankings are food for thought.

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