Performance appraisal of employees consists of detailed reviews of past performance, evaluating whether they have achieved the goals set for their positions, assisting them to improve on their performance and setting new goals and finally, working towards the larger goal of charting their career paths. It is an essential periodic routine that all organizations need to conduct but it's a chore that most HR managers dislike and many employees dread. The process is tedious, time-consuming and liable at every stage to be subjective, debatable and prone to errors of judgment.

Employee self-assessment, peer reviews and other such modern concepts in Human Resource management have ensured that a more global viewpoint is generated during performance appraisals. Today, technology has taken the sting out of many of these face-to-face interactions. Remote working means that employees and managers have access to instant communication via SMS, e-mail and in-house electronic communication through secure channels and sophisticated devices. This also means that information can flow back and forth freely, thus making the review process much more interactive and democratic. The concept of €work€ today includes global teams, virtual offices, remote working, flexi-time working, consultancy, part-time vs full-time workers and much more. Hence, on-line employee performance appraisal systems are gaining popularity and replacing traditional paper evaluation systems in HR departments the world over. As a result, many organizations, whether large, medium or small, are seeing great benefits in conducting on-line performance appraisals of their employees.

Evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of on-line performance appraisals

Advantages

€Instant access to all documents, time-sheets, prior evaluations and relevant files
€Comprehensive list of all staff
€Automatically checks for sensitive wording and terminology to avoid legal issues
€Global criteria from all departments
€Greater confidentiality
€Ability to integrate trends and patterns
€Helps to design more efficient working methods, plot career paths
€Seen as objective and impartial
€Can be customized to suit the organization
€Allows managers to be more critical and objective than when in face-to-face appraisals

Disadvantages

€Can be expensive and too complex for smaller organizations
€Creates even more distance between remote employees and management
€Requires higher level technical infrastructure
€Tends to give €flat€ reviews which are similar laterally across the organization
€Seen as impersonal
€No scope for clarification questions by the employee being assessed
€Lack of personal interaction
€Leaves a trail of documents which could be called for in a lawsuit
€Confidentiality is compromised if the company's system is hacked

Keeping these factors in mind, an organization can select the most appropriate on-line performance appraisal system.