Ask most employees how they feel about performance appraisals and you will get some version of the same answer. Stressful. Pointless. A box-ticking exercise that takes up half a day and changes nothing.

Ask most managers and you will hear something similar. Time-consuming. Awkward. Hard to know what to say when someone's performance is genuinely mixed.

The problem is not the appraisal itself. It is how most organisations run them.

Surprises. If someone hears critical feedback for the first time in their annual review, the system has already failed. A performance conversation should never contain information the employee has not heard before. Feedback belongs in the moment, not stored up for a formal occasion.

One-way delivery. An appraisal where the manager talks and the employee listens is not a performance conversation. It is a performance lecture. The most useful appraisals are genuinely two-way.

The single most effective change you can make to your appraisal process is to require a self-assessment before the manager writes anything.

Here is why it works.

When an employee reflects on their own performance first, they often identify the same issues the manager was going to raise. That changes the conversation entirely. Instead of the manager delivering a verdict, you are both looking at the same picture and discussing what it means.

It also surfaces things the manager might have missed. An employee who has been quietly managing a difficult stakeholder relationship, or who has been developing a skill the manager has not noticed, gets to make that visible.

And it gives the employee agency. They are not a passive recipient of feedback. They are a participant in the conversation.

Keep it simple. A self-assessment does not need to be a lengthy document. It should cover:

• What went well this period and why
• What was harder than expected and what they learned from it
• Progress against any goals set at the last review
• What support or development they need going forward
• What they want to focus on in the next period

That is enough to have a genuinely useful conversation.

If you are running appraisals well, the formal review should feel like a summary of conversations that have already happened, not a reveal.

That means feedback needs to happen regularly, not just at review time. It means goals need to be discussed and adjusted as circumstances change. It means a manager who notices a performance issue addresses it at the time, not six months later.

The appraisal is not the place for the hard conversation. It is the place to reflect on how things have been going and set direction for what comes next.

Many organisations use numerical ratings in their appraisals. If yours does, be consistent about what the ratings mean and train your managers to apply them consistently.

The most common problem I see is rating inflation. Managers who give everyone a 4 out of 5 to avoid difficult conversations. This makes the ratings meaningless and makes it harder to identify who genuinely needs support and who is ready for more responsibility.

If your ratings are not telling you anything useful, it is worth reviewing whether you need them at all.

A good appraisal template does not need to be complicated. It needs to:

• Give the employee a clear structure for their self-assessment
• Give the manager a consistent framework for their observations
• Create space for a genuine two-way conversation
• Document agreed goals and development actions

If you want a template that does all of that, the Performance Appraisals and Self-Assessments section of the Hemingway HR Toolkit has what you need.

Adelle Hemingway is a CPHR and the principal consultant at Hemingway HR. She works with Australian businesses on performance management, employment relations and HR strategy.