Performance Appraisal of Employees (Changing Trends)!
Due to new areas like IT and BPO sectors and severe competition there is formal and informal changed situation in performance appraisal.
These can be briefly explained as under.
Time Factor:
Now a days it has become a standard of practice to stay in office 9 AM to 9 PM irrespective of work load is pressing or not. This is more apparent in IT sector, private Engineering industries and offices. Days are gone when OT payment was insisted for such additional stay in work place.
In any of the IT companies the youngsters stay even upto 11 PM due to work needs. This has work environment effect and changed work culture. How long this trend will continue has to be watched.
Interestingly it is only in India those long hours working is evolved and sustained for last 10-15 years. In Europe and USA none of the IT employees work long hours like this.
Cause and Effect:
The cause of working exposure on prolonged hours has its own health effect on many employees. Most of them suffer from mental strain, fatigue, poor physique, and sulking body and frequent dose of cough, cold and fever.
It is felt that these youth are ageing faster. In case of BPO sector both Men and Women are getting to bad habits of alcoholism, ghutka chewing and unfair companionship. This is corroding the moral and socio-cultural fabric of India. This is mainly due to night time working of BPO sector.
Theory Vs Practice In Performance Appraisal:
The theories of performance appraisal have idealism and they are workable. However in Indian business environment the practice is not well followed as per theoretical ideals. These can be categorised as a practice in government jobs and private company jobs.
Government Jobs:
The employees of state and Central Government offices, Public Sectors have more or less time scale promotions. There is hardly any difference in high merit and low merit employees scales, increments and promotional chances.
This is due to (a) Reservation quota (b) Excess employees and (c) Historical reasons. The good old practice of writing standardized ACR (Annual Confidential Reports) continues. There is not much importance to it.
Transfers, promotions and changes can be governed or arranged based on casteism, regionalism and bribery basis. Even nearly six decades after independence our government offices still continue the British culture. There is hardly any meaning in annual performance appraisal, as time scale is followed in addition to reservation for various categories. Only privatisation of certain offices and corporates can have change effect.
Private Companies:
In private companies the Performance Appraisal is followed too vigorously. People are tired and fired too fast even without giving a chance and time to settle down. This is the reverse situation of government employees.
The 360 appraisals are followed though not in writing. The complaints, information, comments of various employees work as 360 appraisal and these factors will have different degrees of effect on the employees. This causes drastic upgrading of some, transfer of few and demotion of some others.
However professionally managed large size private sectors do not have such abnormality and try to have a balanced picture. However it can be concluded that in private sector the merited and talented employees rise faster and are well rewarded.