Employee appraisal process for managers

The annual appraisal summary must be recorded by completing the Employee Appraisal Completion Form on the conversation template – this acts as both an electronic recording of the date of completion and, where identified, you can log any additional development needs identified as part of the annual summary process.

You can also download the conversation template from the resources page.

The Cumberland staff appraisal conversation template

The sections of the template are designed to cover the key areas of discussion, however, managers should not feel limited by the questions and can adapt them to suit the employee and circumstances.

Section one - Discussion on general wellbeing 

Discussion on workload/personal pressures, your individual support needs, solutions and signposting.

Aimed at being an open discussion to understand the general health and wellbeing of the employee and to provide opportunities to offer support and/or signposting to wellbeing resources and services Looking after your wellbeing (sharepoint.com). It also provides an opportunity to discuss and/or review any reasonable adjustments:

• How are you? How are you really?
• How are things going?
• Anything causing you concern at the moment that we can support you with?
• How does the balance between work and home feel?
• What do you do to help manage your own health and wellbeing?

Section two - Our Cumberland Values

Tell me about how you have demonstrated some or all our values.

What insight did you gain from this? Did you experience any barriers and how did you overcome them?

Our values are the golden thread underpinning everything we do. It may be useful to initially have a discussion on the values and what they mean to the employee and how they resonate with their own values. This will help with further conversations as to how they are bringing our values to life in their everyday work and provide opportunities to discuss where they may be coming across barriers or issues to doing so.

Examples could include:

• If the employee is a Change Champion what has been their involvement? Has it enabled them to collaborate with new colleagues from other teams and services? What benefits has this brought? Do they feel more empowered as a result?
• Has the employee been involved in a particular task or project which has demonstrated an innovative approach/way of working to achieve the result? How did they approach this? What did they learn and what are their reflections?
• Have they shown compassion during the course of their work? What were the circumstances? Has this made them even more ambitious for the development of the service?

Section three - Career aspirations or areas of interest

Is there a particular area or initiative that you have a personal interest in? How do you think you could get more involved in this? How can your role be supported?

Our values and target operating model seek to encourage collaboration, working across the council and with our stakeholders to achieve excellent services and improve the health and wellbeing of all residents of Cumberland. Our employees should be encouraged to be curious and ambitious regarding developing their own skills and experiences and in developing the services of the council.

This section is encouraging conversations regarding how employees can and should be interested in how they can learn about and from other teams and services, share good practice and learning, develop their own skills and competence. This will be different for individuals and provides an opportunity for discussion about their wider interests and aspirations and, in some cases, may also support employee retention and promotion.

One example of a positive development route is becoming a Cumberland Change Champion. A great opportunity to collaborate with a wide range of colleagues and look at innovative ways to develop even better, innovative services to meet the needs of our residents.

Section four - Supporting service and/or team priorities

A) Progress on personal work priorities

This section covers a review of previously agreed work priorities, progress towards and actual achievement.

• What has gone well? What is helping/has helped this?
• What have you learned from this?
• What is impacting on achievement? What have you done/are you doing to reduce this impact?
• What support do you need?

B) Your contribution - New Service/Team Specific Priorities

This section provides the opportunity at the annual summary to discuss and agree new priorities for the next 12 month to support the achievement of personal and team or service priorities.

In considering priorities for employees, managers should consider what are the strengths of that individual and what tasks would really play to those strengths and enable them to grow and thrive. What are the areas that would interest and motivate them and add even more value to the team and organisation?

Once agreed, make sure they are captured on the Appraisal Priorities template.

C) Support and development

In agreeing and setting priorities, it is important to consider the support and development needs to support achievement. This section is to note any development needs which fall outwith the mandatory/required training for their role (which is captured separately through your service line management into a training plan), but would include additional development such as work shadowing, coaching, mentoring, learning journeys and would typically be self driven and/or facilitated and supported by you, the line manager or others within the team/service or may involve collaborating with other teams and services across the council and/or with other key stakeholders.

The council is committed to encouraging the 70:20:10 model of learning, based on the principles that:

• 70% of learning comes from experience on the job, experiment and reflective practice
• 20% comes from working with others, coaching and mentoring
• 10% comes from formal learning interventions such as courses

Consider how can you use this model in your development of individuals and teams.

Where an additional course or learning requirement is identified, this should be submitted by the line manager. It is important not to over promise and is subject to budgetary constraints and priorities. Explore what’s on iLearn.

Overall summary comments and sign off

The last section of the template provides space for the employee and the line manager to add some summary comments. This is space to make an overall comment about the employee’s contribution. If you’ve not covered it in other areas, you may want to include where you have had feedback from others, whether it be their colleagues, other teams or managers they have been working with.

Once agreed, this template supports the employees regular one to one conversations and the annual summary.

Cumberland employee appraisal completion form

Once all this is completed the form should be signed by both parties and dated. Line Managers must ensure the annual summary is recorded on the Cumberland Employee Appraisal completion form, together with any additional personal development needs.

This form captures both the date of completion and any additional learning needs identified and will be collated by LD Admin. These identified needs will then be reviewed by the service/directorate in conjunction with Learning and Development.