The traditional thinking by experts in the field has been that subjectivity does not belong in any kind of rigorous appraisal process because it lacks validity and it is not consistent from manager to manager, and from employee to employee. This has lead to a situation where many HR professionals tend to believe that we need to discourage subjective assessments at all costs – that the only valid performance evaluation is an “objective” one. However, this viewpoint is problematic for the reasons outlined in this article.

Many managers tend to think that they are at the mercy of their employees. They think that if they are lucky enough to have good ones, fine. If not, there is not too much they can do about it. In fact, how motivated and engaged the vast majority of employees will be is much more likely to be a function of how they are managed. In other words, the degree to which employees feel engaged and motivated is more likely to be because of managerial actions rather than in spite of them.

This article explains how managers who give the right kind of performance-related feedback, with the right employees, at the right times, can actively increase employee motivation levels and productivity, while building improved relationships.

At its core the success of all of an organization’s coaching, mentoring, and performance management initiatives, regardless of whether they involve informal just-in-time chats or more formal discussions, is reliant on one fundamental factor. And that is the individual manager’s ability to be able to honestly and accurately assess an employee’s performance and/or potential and then discuss it with him or her in an effective and successful way. When this involves difficult or sensitive negative information managers lack the confidence, skills, and ability to do so in an effective way. This leads to avoidance or poor results.

Engagement, the combination of motivation and commitment that typically leads to superior employee performance and productivity, is increasingly recognized as having a direct effect on organizational success. However, the link between performance-related communication and employee engagement has been underestimated as a critical factor in determining how engaged the vast majority of employees are, or will become. 

There are many different reasons for formalizing employee evaluation and coaching for development. There are just as many arguments against it. Rather than wading into the debate this article assumes that organizations have, for various reasons, committed to their decision to use them. It therefore focuses on explaining why the most popular of these may not be meeting expectations and how organizations can use the PAF feedback process to improve them.

If just hearing the term "theories of motivation" has you groaning please try to give this explanation a chance. It explains a couple of the key ones in a terms that you can not only relate to, but immediately apply through the use of PAF Feedback.

The basis for this discussion is a special version of PAF Feedback that essentially creates the framework for a heart-to-heart chat about someone’s overall performance and potential. Think of it as a “reference”. In other words, it contains the kind of information that the manager might provide in confidence to someone else, but to which the employee is also privy.

Managers, coaches, and mentors are people too.  Imposing formal employee assessment and appraisal methods that do not work with, how they naturally and intuitively assess employee performance is unrealistic and are doomed to fail.