SAP India puts an end to annual appraisal programme

Following the footsteps of its global headquarters, SAP India has also unveiled its new performance management initiative SAP Talk this year, by completely stopping its annual appraisal programme.

“We are at the forefront of innovation in the performance management space. SAP is creating a culture of continuous dialogue centred on employee growth and development – without ratings, a simpler approach to managing performance,” Director and Head Human Resources at SAP India Vibha Shukla told DH.

She also revealed that the process called SAP Talk brings to life ‘Real Conversations in Real Time’ and supports SAP’s strategy to continue to build a high-performance organisation.

“SAP will map employees based on their contributions and potential, but the plan is moving to a method that is more ongoing, collaborative and capable of replacing the usual once-a-year process. Along with multiple tools, SAP will be doing this through extensive use of SAP Success Factors HR Solution,”
 When asked about the rollout in India, she said that it is absolutely relevant in the Indian context where a large technology workforce is involved in driving the innovation. “Getting a continuous feedback throughout the year is a driver for employee engagement and world-class innovation. Currently, about 10% of India employees are undergoing Early Adopter process and we are getting positive feedback from the stakeholders,” she said.

SAP employs over 10,000 people at its entities like SAP Labs India, SAP India, Ariba, Sybase and Concur. She said, going forward, a manager’s role will be that of a player-coach and that of a guide to provide continuous feedback through the year and also help in building the capabilities.

“After the success of the Early Adopter group (pilot programme), SAP Talk model based on SAP Success factor technology will be rolled out in 2017 to all countries along with manager and employee enablement. There are multiple communication channels being used  for this adoption and change management,” said Shukla. SAP is known for its superior human resources (HR) software and has made a big bet on performance-management tools with the $3.4 billion acquisition of US cloud-computing company successfactors.com in 2012.