Essay Sample on Benefits and Drawbacks of Absolute Performance Standards

The purpose of an absolute standard is to evaluate the performance of workers when comparing their performance using set standards. It helps in understanding the performance of individual employees by not comparing employee to employee performance but about the rules that the business organization expects from every single employee. The absolute standard has various benefits to the organization and the firm. It helps the company in measuring its progress and the progress of its employees (Collins, 2007). The method of performance appraisal also helps the employees understand their strengths, weaknesses, and knowledge and potential. As a result, they can develop a course of action to enhance their strengths and overcome the shortcomings of employees. Also, it exposes adverse incidences which the employees have been committing in the workplace. This happens mainly when the critical incident approach is applied to appraise employees. The absolute performance standard is just good, theoretically, but it is unachievable in real life. It has errors and defects like any other operation or process in the company. It is costly and time-consuming to implement as it requires purchasing of equipment, technology and machinery. Furthermore, there is a need to train personnel to carry the whole process, thus require a considerable budget.

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Evaluating performance with relevant standards is a method used for assessing the performance of employees through the use of pre-determined distribution where the employees are assigned grades. Its purpose is to separate high performing workers from poor performers by grading high, average, below average and poor performers. The main advantage of this method is that it ranks employees performance, and therefore, the employer has the opportunity to separate high performing workers from poor performers. The disadvantage of this method is that it usually fails when all the workers have the same level of performance; thus, it cannot separate high performing workers from the rest (Catano, 2009). It is also costly to implement as it requires training of various personnel to accomplish effectively. Another disadvantage is that it cannot be used in a small organization which cannot allow workers to be in multiple categories of grade levels. For that matter, it only works in large business organizations where there are high performers, those below average and poor performers. These two appraisal methods work more appropriately when they are used together. Human resource managers must advice the management effectively to understand the performance of their employees. The employees must not be fired for having performed poorly once after every two years, they must be given the opportunity to improve not to eliminate required talent in the company.

It is recommended to use the absolute standard to evaluate or to measure the performance of workers in the organization instead of employing other methods because it helps in identifying the strengths, weaknesses and employees potential which the organization can change to improve the overall organization performance. Although it looks expensive and requires high capital outlay, it is capable of showing employees that meets the expectation of the organization as compared to performance with relevant standards which distribute employees based on pre-determined grades such as high, average and below-average degrees. It is wrong to use this method because it cannot work when all the employees have the same level of performance, thus stands useless in the organization. Furthermore, it cannot identify the strengths and weaknesses of the individual worker; therefore, cannot be used to overcome company challenges. Therefore I strongly recommend evaluation performance with absolute standards.

References

Catano, V. (2009). The measure of Absolute Standards. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Collins, S. K. (2007).Employee Appraisal Techniques. The Health Care Manager, 26(3), 213-217. doi:10.1097/01.hcm.0000285011.80655.70