By ARUNA KAMATH
Consultant, Rage Communications
Appraisals — an annual ritual when accountants bury themselves under heaps of paper to do some serious number crunching; when employees push themselves harder to whip up good work in a last ditch effort to impress their superiors; and when bosses get down to the arduous task of evaluating employees’ performances. Yes, it’s that time of the year when no one is spared, neither the manager nor the employees. The inevitable, inescapable appraisal meeting is looming large before everyone in the office.
Preparations start a few weeks before the actual meeting itself. Forms, running into a few pages, are handed out to employees. After much hemming and hawing, they are duly filled and handed over to their respective superiors. Like a teacher grappling with the correction of exam papers, scores of papers pile up before the boss, all staring anxiously, waiting to be rated.
Believe me, it’s not the rigour or going through these papers that psyches me, but the sheer responsibility of handling them. I, for one, am completely paranoid about misplacing and losing them. And then of course there is another challenge we have to confront — storing and retrieving the information. It’s tedious and painful, and if it’s not done in an organised manner, it can end up in a huge mess.
Given all these drawbacks, why are we sticking to this traditional method? When everything has gone digital, right from leave applications to visiting cards, why can’t the appraisal system be digitized too? After all, in doing so, you would also be contributing your mite to saving the earth by conserving paper.
If you already didn’t know let’s just tell you how much wastage is happening and the imminent damage its causing the earth. Imagine you’re a company with around 100 employees. If each one gets a set of three appraisal sheets, it works out to a total of 300 sheets. Now, if appraisals are done bi-annually, add another 300 to this. Assuming, there is no wastage, 600 is the minimum number of sheets that gets distributed every year. And if your company grows, the next time around, during appraisal time, you will be circulating more papers.
These figures probably don’t mean much to you unless they are translated into these shocking statistics:
• Making one single sheet of copy paper can use over 13 ounces of water, more than a typical soda can.
• A typical office produces about 1.5 pounds of paper waste per employee per day. The waste increases to 2 pounds in financial services industry.
• Paper waste accounts for up to 40% of total waste produced in the United States each year, which adds up to 71.6 million tons of paper waste per year in the United States alone.
If you’re one of those who falls into the ‘technologically challenged’ category or one of those souls who still believes strongly in traditional methods, you’d probably scoff at these figures and consider me silly. But I know I am not in the minority here when I constantly hear one of my colleagues grumble: “Why can’t somebody think of a better way to handle the onerous mountain of paperwork during appraisals?”
Feedback: aruna@rage-india.com
