I am currently working on appraisal training for managers and staff and need some guidelines on short appraisal training sessions for managers and staff. I need to address in particular reluctance and cynacism around the topic of annual appraisals. I would be interested to get intouch with Kirsten Holder regarding her comments to a similar query in April 2003
Lisa Buisson
Lisa Buisson
4 Responses
Acknowledge the problems
Hi Lisa
I’ve had a bit of experience running short appraisal training sessions to public sector staff. Yes loads of reluctance – mainly due to the fact that previous schemes just hadn’t been operated properly by line managers! We did a survey to find out exactly what had gone wrong with the previous system and designed a programme that tried to address all these issues. (The problem was mainly poor management) We also made appraisal training an integral part of management development. We also made sure that staff felt empowered to ask for support and coaching if they wanted it.
In some ways the training is the easy part – the hard bit is making sure that people commit to making it work afterwards!
Email me if you want to talk more.
Jane Smith.
Word Smiths
Happy to help
Hi Lisa
Happy to help if i can, had lots of experience at delivering a variety of appraisal sessions to all levels of staff.
Please feel free to email me at Kirsten.holder@heartsol.wmids.nhs.uk, or give me a call on 0121 424 1640
Learndirect
Learndirect offer these types of course online, May be an approach as the course are online. Could be an initial step, followed up by a workshop.
dealing with cynicism
The cynicism is often well-founded. They have had too many experiences of appraisals that are superficial, don’t relate to the actual job etc.
Unless there is a realistic system in place that realy works, the training can’t help a lot.
Even so, sometimes it’s useful to surface the cynicism in a “group groan” as I sometimes call it; a punchy, quick brainstorm “What’s wrong with appraisal in this organisation?” can be followed by asking them “How will you put it right?”
Working from that point of view, you should get some good buy in, especially if you keep putting the responsibility back to them “So what do your staff need in the way of appraisal? What can you do to make it work?” and so on. You need to be quite tough, but it can work very well.
You may find some useful stuff at http://www.betterappraisals.net