Scrum to Overcome Useless Employee Appraisals

Create meaningful employee appraisals with Scrum.

Scrum is an Agile development framework that Jeff Sutherland invented at Easel Corporation in 1993. Sutherland explains how to apply Scrum to performance appraisals in a recent blog post. His approach should improve the process and the outcome.

Sutherland suggests that Scrum works for appraisals because, the review process starts with self-evaluation and then facilitates a conversation between the reviewer and reviewee.

This improves communication, helps build mutual understanding of performance, makes the rating system more objective, and requires raters to work closely with another rater to “sanity check” the ratings.

There are three meetings required to implement the Scrum review process. These include:

• Meeting 1: Document is reviewed and the person being reviewed is asked to answer key question as self-review.

• Meeting 2: Self review is returned. Discussion takes place and after meeting reviewers adds their perspective.

• Meeting 3: Edited and updated document is discussed. Disagreements are noted. Rebuttals are accepted and final document is approved by each party in the review process.

For a sample rating scale and a review template form, visit the link below. This is a one-stop resource for improving your next batch of employee reviews.