What do Millennial's really think about appraisals?

It’s almost the end of the financial year for many businesses and this will bring about an event dreaded by employees everywhere: the annual end of year appraisal. Appraisals have a notoriously bad reputation (one that we at Actus™ absolutely refute), but I will admit that appraisals can be a bit of a weird phenomenon for the Millennial.

When you first enter the workplace, you might not even know what end of year appraisals are. When you learn what they are, you might decide they’re a waste of time. They might make you feel like a child again, trying to explain your school report to your parents.

The thing about appraisals is that if handled well, they can be helpful. You get an opportunity to reflect on what you’ve done well in the past six months or year and you get to talk to your manager about the issues you’d like help with. Your manager also gets to give you some feedback, which can be great – but if it’s not what you were expecting, their comments can be quite difficult to accept.

No one likes negative feedback. Regardless of who it comes from, negative feedback can be a difficult pill to swallow. However, for the poor Millennial, it’s supposedly even more difficult to stomach.