Come April and it is also the time for employee appraisals. This is a very important element of the overall HR process and very critical for business continuity and momentum. A formal appraisal process should be set up in place. Very often, memories are limited to the past 2-3 months of the year and one tends to forget what happened in the first 9 months! The appraisal process needs to cover the full year.
Salary hikes are an outcome of the appraisal process. In India, salaries tend to become public as soon as they are announced. This leads to some disgruntlement. Most people tend to feel they are underpaid not because they feel they should have got more, but because a colleague got more! There isn’t much one can do as management about these issues other than to tell staff that no changes in salaries will be done. It typically dies down in a few days, and it is back to normalcy.
It is also a good idea to do recruitments early in the year to plan for growth. There will always be some attrition in the April-May months since employees can get “double hikes” – take the hike after the appraisal, and change jobs to get an even bigger increment. Of course, frequent changes like these will adversely impact the employee’s career.
