A month ago I reviewed “the cuddilow”, a pillow developed by Travelodge to ease the despair of lonely business travellers, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect was a moronic way to begin a new job on The Times. There followed something arguing that work experience should be banned, which again seemed like a good idea until the morning of publication, when my new boss arrived with a work-experience student in tow. Then there was a cringe-making mistake with a new colleague’s name, a faux pas at the printer, and . . . oh God . ..

In case you’re concerned, these are not the solipsistic ramblings of a man on the brink of a breakdown. I have merely been analysing my recent professional performance after reading an article in People Management magazine headlined: “Self-evaluation makes for happier staff”. It reported that an American company called ConnectiCare had achieved “impressive results” after allowing its call-centre representatives to assess their own performance. Apparently, the year-long scheme, which involved employees rating themselves on a range of criteria on a scale of one to 100, helped to lead to a staff turnover rate of 10.5 per cent – “well below the industry average”.

Getting staff to assess their own performance may sound like an extreme response to the problem of workplace appraisals. But then the problem with appraisals is extreme. They take different forms in different companies, but what they have in common is that they are usually annual, usually involve a tense exchange between employer and employee, have a knack of being timed to coincide with the employee making a major cockup, and invariably leave both parties depressed.

One of the reasons they don’t work is that bosses are useless at assessing employee performance. This is because managers tend to (i) have a bias towards people similar to them; (ii) mark people, in general, averagely; (iii) base their assessments on random events they vaguely recall rather than on a comprehensive view of someone’s work; and (iv) focus on the work that the employee has done on projects important to the development of their own careers.

Meanwhile, appraisals are onerous for employees because they are human beings and therefore object to being graded like farmyard chickens and stabbed in the chest in broad daylight. Even a positive appraisal can have a powerfully demotivating effect on a good employee if it is less enthusiastic than the one they got last year, or if they discover someone incompetent received an equally positive assessment.

But are self-appraisals the answer? I can see ConnectiCare’s logic.

If corporations are sincere about letting employees “own” their careers, which is the assumption at the heart of the tortuous ritual of the annual appraisal, then why not go the whole hog and entrust them with the entire task? Besides, no one knows your work better than you (which is why self-evaluation has been introduced as an important element of school inspections) and self-appraisals are self-policing, in that nobody would, surely, gaze at themselves in the mirror and conclude they were the human incarnation of the Holy Spirit on earth. Would they?

Unfortunately, they might. Psychological studies offer different results, but one thing that crops up repeatedly is people’s tendency to be easy on themselves, with one report famously showing 95 per cent of employees at one organisation ranking themselves among the top half of the workforce in terms of job performance.

But this generalisation is only the beginning of our dysfunction. Some people are routinely hard on themselves.

Comparative studies have shown that women don’t exaggerate their achievements as much as men, that Americans are prone to “self-enhancement”, that the Japanese “are relatively conducive to self-criticism”, and that Canadians, compared with the Japanese, typically “bolster their self- assessments in one domain” if shown to be weak in another.

As for us Brits, we are probably the most dysfunctional. If my approach is anything to go by, our culture encourages us to view self-evaluation as a form of punishment – “go up to your room and take a good look at yourself” – and many of us somehow manage to combine intense self-deprecation with concomitant high self-regard. Frankly, if we dragged strangers in from the stree and forced them to smoke crack before asking them to rate our professional competence, we’d get more accurate appraisals than those filtered through our own neuroses.

Which means ConnectiCare is away with the fairies, right? Not necessarily. And to understand why you need to take a look at Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why they Backfire and What to do Instead, by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins. The book is interesting not only because it lays out the problems with appraisals comprehensively, but because its suggested solution comes on page 304, in the form of the comment: “We cannot tell you, exactly, what to do instead of appraisal. Viable alternatives to appraisal can emerge only within the context of your unique organisation.”

My initial response on reading this was to want to demand a refund. But, actually, they are right. There is no simple solution to the problem of appraisals. Hundreds of training and development companies will tell you otherwise, but when you look at what they are offering as alternatives, they are just annual appraisals in a different format. Realistically, all we can do is look for options that aren’t quite as bad. And self-appraisals are an improvement of sorts.

Admittedly, they share many of the problems of the conventional appraisal. They do not provide realistic feedback. They are not a neutral way of spotting talent or measuring and rewarding performance. They are based on the fallacy that employees “own” their careers – of course, we don’t; we could be dismissed at any time. But self-appraisals are, at least, less likely to result in demotivated employees. Even those of us who can’t help concluding we’re a waste of space when we look at ourselves will concede that self-examination isn’t as painful as being told we’re useless by a boss.

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