Does performance appraisal take too long? Let’s calculate just how much time the performance management process takes. The planning meeting lasts forty-five minutes to an hour, once a year. Writing some- body’s performance appraisal takes another hour, maybe an hour and a half. And the performance appraisal discussion takes about forty-five minutes with most people.
That’s about three hours. Add another three hours for preparation, thinking, and planning. Now you’re up to six hours per person.
There are exactly 2,000 work hours in a year (8 hours a day days a week 50 weeks a year 2,000). Six hours therefore represents 0.3 percent of a manager’s time devoted to performance management for each employee. What ‘‘better things’’ do you have to do?
Too often, the complaint about performance management taking too much time results because neither appraisers nor appraisees have a clear picture of exactly what is expected of the process and what the benefits of an effective performance management process are. Obviously, if people don’t understand why they are doing something and they don’t know how to do it well, it will seem like a timewaster.