Where do appraisal forms go?

[walthamalltheway]

Does anyone know if Appraisal forms go directly to HR? My appraisal form was overall poor- but I wanted to include achievements that I have made during my time in the team. I wrote additional comments (achievements) on my appraisal form, told my manager this and will sign thereafter. I haven't heard anything back since. When I asked my manager this, she said that I didn't need to sign it and the form is only kept in between the organisation- but wouldn't the appraisal form to straight to HR?

There's no one answer to this I'm afraid, every organisation has its own system. In my organisation the forms don't go anywhere at all, it's just between you and your line manager. Many organisations have a system where the head of department or line manager's manager sees all the forms and also signs off but then they are kept locally within the department without being sent anywhere else. In other organisations the forms are stored on some kind of electronic system which HR have admin access to but they wouldn't necessarily be actively looking at the forms and reading the comments. In other organisations HR actively review (for pay purposes or whatever) and would definitely look at every individual form - although I would say it's not very common for HR to be closely reading through the achievements and comments section on every form, more often they just extract the overall ratings for use in pay/talent management type processes. They may pull a random selection of forms for audit/quality assurance processes but this wouldn't usually have any kind of impact on the individuals involved.

Overall if you aren't clear from what your manager has said I would probably email HR directly and ask - if they do store the forms centrally you can ask that they keep the version with your additional comments on it. But it sounds to me as though your organisation isn't particularly bothered about the form and where it goes, which isn't necessarily a bad thing - current HR thinking is that the appraisal process is most useful when it's a high quality conversation between the individual and their manager rather than being a central/corporately driven mandated process that can turn into a bit of a box ticking exercise so in forward-thinking organisations there's a lot less focus on form-filling/returning/signing/filing than previously.