We score employees all year, but we never score the manager

Ask a Nigerian employee what she remembers about her last appraisal, and she will not describe the rating. She will describe the surprise. A manager sits her down in December and reads out objectives written the previous January, objectives the business abandoned in March, replaced in May, and forgotten by July. She listens, nods, and receives a number. The paperwork says performance was managed. The conversation says otherwise.

The data backs this up. Gallup’s research on performance management found that only 14 per cent of employees strongly agree their reviews inspire them to improve. Only 29 per cent strongly agree the reviews are fair, and only 26 per cent believe they are accurate. This year, with the new minimum wage and inflation forcing many Nigerian employers to reopen salary structures, ratings decided who received an adjustment and who did not. A process that fails to convince most employees has become the basis for the year’s biggest pay decisions.

We Track Completion, Not Conversation

HR dashboards report how many staff set objectives, how many managers submitted mid-year reviews, and what share of appraisals cleared the deadline on time. None of these figures tells you whether a manager sat with an employee and had a conversation worth remembering.

A company can report 98 per cent completion and still fail at managing performance. Completion and quality are separate things, and we keep measuring the one we can count instead of the one that matters.

Look at where accountability sits. The employee carries the weight of the rating, HR carries the process, and the manager often carries little more than a deadline. We ask the least powerful person in the room to answer for the outcome, and we ask the most powerful person to answer for a form.

Digital Systems Fix Less Than We Hope

I led a project moving performance reviews onto a global digital system at a previous employer, and I would make that decision again. It brought consistency and a proper audit trail. But a system, however well built, records a conversation. It cannot create one.

If an employee has struggled since April and only learns this in December, the software has not failed. The manager has. No dashboard changes that fact.

Keep the Rating. Change What We Rate the Manager On.

There is a popular argument that companies should scrap ratings altogether. It solves the wrong problem. Nigerian organisations still need to make different decisions about pay and promotion for different people, and removing the number does not remove the judgement behind it; it only removes the paper trail an employee could use to challenge that judgement. A rating can be appealed. A manager’s private opinion cannot.

So keep the rating, but stop rating managers on whether they submitted a form by a deadline. Rate them on these four questions instead:

How many of your people were surprised by their year-end rating? A surprise low rating means months passed without coaching or a warning.

Were objectives updated when the business changed direction? If a priority shifted in June and the goals on file still read January, the manager filed paperwork rather than managed a person.

Can each of your people describe what good performance looks like, in their own words? Ask the employee this question, not the manager.

When was the first written note of concern dated? If the answer is November, the problem sits with the manager, not the employee.

The Form Is a Receipt, Not the Work Itself

None of this is an argument against paperwork. In a country where employment disputes turn on what can be shown in writing, documentation matters and should stay. The mistake is treating the existence of a form as proof that management took place. A receipt can show that a transaction happened, but it cannot tell you whether the product itself was any good.

Nigerian employers face a genuine problem right now. Skilled staff are scarce and mobile, and losing a capable manager to a role abroad carries a real cost. The usual response is to tighten the process further, add another layer of calibration, and revise the rating scale again. I have sat in those meetings and pushed for some of those changes myself.

I would ask that the next redesign start somewhere else. Not with the form, but with a question few HR teams ask out loud: why are we so exacting about holding employees to account for their performance, and so relaxed about holding managers to account for managing it?

Until that question gets a proper answer, the appraisal will keep doing the one thing it does well. It will prove that performance management happened. It will not tell anyone whether performance improved.

Morakinyo (Akin) Isaac-Olaniyi is the Associate Director of Talent Development and Performance Management, IHS Towers