---
title: "Core Steps of Performance Appraisal: \"Three Determinations and Three Emphases\""
description: "The article outlines the six core steps of performance appraisal implementation, known as \"Three Determinations and Three Emphases\": setting goals, standards, and weights, and emphasizing coaching, evaluation, and feedback interviews. It provides practical guidance for HR managers and supervisors to effectively manage performance appraisal processes."
author: "马同华"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2016-07-29"
language: "en"
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# Core Steps of Performance Appraisal: "Three Determinations and Three Emphases"

> The article outlines the six core steps of performance appraisal implementation, known as "Three Determinations and Three Emphases": setting goals, standards, and weights, and emphasizing coaching, evaluation, and feedback interviews. It provides practical guidance for HR managers and supervisors to effectively manage performance appraisal processes.

> Author: Ma Tonghua
>
> Source: Sanmao Network
>
Some say performance appraisal is a chemical agent that can turn "dead water into living water, and living water into boiling water." Others say performance appraisal is an internal competition within the enterprise, where those with good performance cheer and those with poor performance worry. When such phenomena occur, performance appraisal becomes a headache for HR managers, which is also a result of enterprises only focusing on performance appraisal and evaluation while neglecting the overall performance appraisal process.

The implementation of the performance appraisal process can be said to be the top priority in performance management, playing a crucial role in the effectiveness of the entire performance management. So how to implement this process and what issues should be noted are exactly the concerns of every supervisor and employee involved in the appraisal.

Based on the practical operations of performance appraisal management in various enterprises and feedback on related issues, the implementation process of performance appraisal mainly includes six core steps, namely "Three Determinations and Three Emphases": setting goals, setting standards, setting weights, emphasizing coaching, emphasizing evaluation, and emphasizing interviews.

01
**Setting Goals**

**1. Understanding Performance Goals**

So-called performance goals, specifically, refer to the goals that employees' future performance should achieve. They help employees focus on items that are more important to the organization, encourage better planning to allocate key resources (time, money, and energy), and stimulate the preparation of action plans to achieve the goals. Individual employee performance goals are derived from the decomposition and inheritance of the overall goals of the organization and departments, that is, through a specially designed process that makes goals operable, decomposing goals level by level to various units of the organization. The overall goals of the organization are converted into specific goals for each level of the organization, from overall organizational goals to business unit goals, then to departmental goals, and finally to individual goals. The formulation of individual performance goals comes from personal work plans, from annual plans to quarterly plans, and finally decomposed into monthly plans.

**2. Goal Setting Methods**

According to the organizational strategy of the enterprise, decompose the main goals of each department. Based on the goals of each department, clarify the individual's job responsibilities and mission, that is, the work tasks undertaken by the individual. Based on individual work tasks, formulate work plans, and extract key performance indicators (divided into quantitative and qualitative indicators) from personal work plans according to the SMART principle.

**3. Operational Tips**

To ensure the reasonable and effective setting of personal performance goals, the following should be done: supervisors formulate, employees participate, and both parties confirm.

For work goals, it is required that supervisors, based on the decomposition of departmental goals, propose requirements for employees' job responsibilities and mission, completing the inheritance from organizational goals to personal performance goals. At the same time, the extraction of individual key performance indicators should be led by the supervisor, with employee participation, and completed jointly by both parties. If employees participate in setting goals, they will work harder to achieve them. Their higher-level needs include executing a valuable task, making joint efforts in the group, setting their goals together, sharing the rewards of efforts, and continuous personal growth.

After setting goals, employees should be allowed to participate in or even independently formulate plans to achieve these goals. Providing employees with a certain degree of autonomy is valuable, as they can better utilize their intelligence and pay more attention to the success of the plan.

02
**Setting Standards**

After setting performance goals, the next step is to determine the standards for evaluating the achievement of performance goals. Goals without clear standards are not true performance goals. The SMART principle is the most commonly used tool to distinguish whether a standard meets requirements. That is, goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This principle reflects that the performance appraisal goals we determine must be measurable or calculable.

At the same time, we should also note that the setting of standards should be hierarchical. For example, we can divide standards into five levels: excellent, good, qualified, needs improvement, and unqualified. We take "qualified" as the benchmark level for performance appraisal, and its role is to judge whether the appraisee's performance can meet basic requirements. In addition, when formulating standards, we must pay attention to communication with employees, that is, the determination of performance appraisal standards should be jointly determined by the supervisor and the employee.

03
**Setting Weights**

In enterprise human resource performance management, employee performance is diverse. The quality of performance is not determined by a single factor but is influenced by multiple subjective and objective factors. Therefore, it is necessary to establish an enterprise performance indicator evaluation system. After determining the performance appraisal goals and standards, the next step is to clarify the relative importance of indicators, that is, weight assignment. Usually, this is a situation that managers do not pay much attention to, and it is likely to be determined by intuition or experience, as long as the total weight sums to 100%. In fact, the design of appraisal weights is related to the orientation of work behavior. Overemphasizing or underestimating a certain indicator will bring adverse consequences.

The precise measurement of weight coefficients mainly includes "expert consultation method, paired comparison method, analytic hierarchy process," etc. For example, a sales department has two indicators: "customer service satisfaction" and "total sales." Whether it is a 30-70 split or a 40-60 split will have a significant impact on employees. It can be said that weight design is the link that measures whether the measured performance is consistent with actual performance. Weight is the quantitative distribution of the importance of the evaluated indicators. Through the determination of weights, the role of each evaluation indicator is treated differently, thereby accurately reflecting the degree of influence of various indicators on the evaluation results. Finally, the weights corresponding to each indicator in the evaluation system form an indicator weight system. It can be seen that setting weights directly determines the reliability and validity of performance appraisal results.

04
**Emphasizing Coaching**

**1. Understanding Performance Coaching**

The performance coaching stage is in the middle of the entire performance management process and is also the most time-consuming and critical stage. The quality of this process directly affects the success or failure of performance management. Specifically, the main work in the performance coaching stage is continuous performance communication, collecting data to form the basis for assessment. The purpose of communication is twofold: one is for employees to report their work and progress, or to seek help and methods from supervisors when encountering obstacles in their work; the other is for supervisors to promptly correct deviations between employees' work and the target plan.

**2. Significance**

For supervisors, timely and effective communication helps to fully understand employees' work situations, grasp the progress information of work, and provide targeted coaching and resources, which helps to improve subordinates' work capabilities and achieve the purpose of motivation. At the same time, supervisors can grasp the basis for performance evaluation in order to make fair and objective evaluations of subordinates. For employees, they can get feedback on their work performance in order to improve performance and skills as soon as possible. At the same time, employees can promptly obtain corresponding resources and help from supervisors to better achieve their goals. Performance coaching based on effective communication is also an opportunity for both parties to solve problems together, and it is also a form of employee participation in management. Finally, in the process of performance coaching, for employees' outstanding contributions and high-performance behaviors, timely praise from supervisors will greatly mobilize employees' work enthusiasm, strengthen and continue good behaviors, and help create a good organizational performance atmosphere.

05
**Emphasizing Evaluation**

When conducting performance evaluation, many enterprises first require employees to self-evaluate their performance achievement. After employee self-evaluation, the supervisor evaluates the employee against the performance goals and standards that were jointly determined with the employee at the beginning.

One point to note here is that the supervisor first needs to summarize and check whether the employee's relevant performance data is accurate and complete. If inconsistent data is found, it should be verified or compared with data collected through another channel to judge the credibility of the original information. Only after confirming that the data is sufficient and error-free can the evaluation of the employee's performance be based on these data. Common evaluation methods include: work standard method, narrative evaluation method, scale evaluation method, daily scoring record method, critical incident record evaluation method, management by objectives method, forced distribution method, paired comparison method, etc. In specific operations, the above methods are often not used alone but mixed together. No company's performance evaluation method is perfect; there is no best performance evaluation tool, only the tool that is most suitable for the actual situation of the enterprise.

Effective performance evaluation relies on two factors: one is that the evaluation system is reasonable, and the other is that the evaluator has evaluation skills and can ensure the accuracy of performance interviews. The latter is particularly important.

06
**Emphasizing Interviews**

**1. Operational Methods**

Regarding the appraisal results, both parties conduct an interview and communication. That is to say, for the appraisal results, employees can put forward their own opinions. If the supervisor thinks the opinions are reasonable and well-founded, the score can be revised. Ultimately, a consensus on the performance appraisal results should be reached, and employees should sign to confirm their recognition of the appraisal results. Usually, feedback should focus on specific work behaviors; rely on objective data, not subjective opinions and inferences. In short, as long as employees treat feedback sincerely, feedback is related to work tasks, and recipients can choose new behaviors from alternative suggestions, performance feedback is likely to guide behavior change.

**2. Steps for Performance Feedback Interview**

1. Interview preparation. Mainly includes the preparation of relevant data and analysis, that is, the supervisor must conduct performance diagnosis before the performance interview. The supervisor should not only tell the employee the appraisal results but also tell the employee why such performance occurred and how to avoid low performance.

2. Interview process control. First, the supervisor should start by explaining the purpose and specific agenda of the interview, which helps to eliminate tension between both parties and also facilitates both parties to control the interview process. Second, during the interview, the supervisor must pay attention to balancing speaking and asking, listening to the appraisee's opinions, fully mobilizing the enthusiasm of the other party to discuss, winning cooperation, and avoiding confrontation and conflict. The supervisor should only talk about the employee's work performance and not make comments about the employee personally. Negative evaluations are inevitable, but in order to maintain the employee's good self-image, you can start with positive evaluations. If there is a significant difference in views between the manager and the employee, both parties should first identify the differences.

3. Determine the performance improvement plan. When discussing the causes of performance, the consensus reached by both parties should be recorded in a timely manner. These issues may be the areas that employees need to focus on and improve in the next period, and the next stage's performance priorities and goals are planned. After the interview, both parties should promptly record and organize the conclusive opinions reached by consensus or the key events or data confirmed by both parties, and fill them in the appraisal form. The next period's performance goals reached by consensus should also be organized to form the next period's assessment indicators and standards.

-END-

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