Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS)

One of the typical critism to performance review or appraisal is that appraisers are prone to evaluate subordinate by relying on personal judgement.

Adopting "Behaviourally Anchored Rating Scale" means, in the preparation stage of performance review, listing out different behaviour examples which will be treated as benchmark for evaluating performance target or core competency.

List out examples of behaviour that will be encouraged, and those will require intervened.

There are two ways that help supervisor or human resources colleagues to list out behaviour:

A. Based on Prior Performance Review/Appraisal

The first approach is to make reference to prior appraisal. Looking at records of, for example, prior apprasial of high-performers, we should be able to identify typical supervisor's comments or appraisees' actions that are praised or rewarded.

On the contrary, we can also find typical comments or behaviour for colleagues that require imminent improvment plan.

By automating performance review in HR-system, comments or action examples should be able to extracted systematically according to apprasees' grading, which facilitates supervisors or HR colleagues to set the stage for subsequent performance review with behaviour benchmark.

B. Resort to Management and Professional Association

Another option is to seek management or professional association input.

We should directly approach management team and see what are their expectation on different functions and different departments.

On the other hand, professional associations usually set out standards or best practice that all members should demonstrate in their work.

Ask your management team and/or relevant professional association: If one has to outperform and get a high rating in performance review, what he or she should do in daily work in order to justify?