Do you use ChatGPT at work? For appraisals?

[Workshysharon]

It’s mid year appraisal time and I have to write 20 appraisals which I dread. I always end up spending the weekends and find it difficult to write 20 different appraisal essentially saying the same thing with some variety. Has anyone used ChatGPT at work and to write appraisals? I have never used it, but have just signed up hoping to save myself a lot of time.

That's disrespectful to your reports and chances are they'll be able to tell.

Does your employer have a policy on this? Whether specifically or generally in terms of feeding company/employee data into third party apps.

Don't feed anything confidential into ChatGPT. The data is used to train it.

Appraisals for employees?

Depends how serious you take your managerial role if so.

No confidential data would be input. I’d feed it key words/ bullet points and then was hoping the app could write it out

I would still include why I want to say and I obviously have the actual conversation with them too. Writing 20 appraisals is an absolute nightmare.

I wouldn’t use ChatGPT, no. Are you writing them from scratch? The scalable way to do this for lots of employees (which my org does) is to get the employee to write their self-reflection part of their appraisal first - then you can pretty quickly add comments agreeing/confirming or giving pointers/challenging them to stretch a bit more.

I’ve just noticed your username, OP. @Workshysharon very funny for this thread 🤣

I do use chat gpt for work but I'm not sure I'd go as far as using it for appraisals.

I might ask it to summarise long pieces of text, reword things or slightly expand on something. I never use it to start from scratch.

Absolutely never feed it anything company sensitive or confidential. It would be frowned upon to use it for something as personal as an appraisal as your reports deserve genuine and thoughtful feedback.

Using ChatGPT for some nice wording is perfectly fine, but why do you have to write 20 different things? Don't you have some sort of framework or format to follow?
For example we use what we'd like them to start, continue and stop doing. Also the what they achieved, and the how.

My best bosses have never been fond of long written appraisals, however they can be a useful tool in case of any HR issues so what we've done is as PP said usually the employees list all their achievements etc throughout the year and boss adds a short comment.

Yes we also write self appraisals. I am not trying to avoid giving a true and fair appraisal, I just really struggle with writing it in a different format so many times. Many of the appraisals cover the same thing and I also don’t want to copy/ paste

I’ve used our internal one to help turn bullet points into more coherent thoughts, and to suggest tasks to focus on based on a job description. But it’s internal - I’m not sure I’d use a public AI

I wonder if you're overthinking the level of variation you need to come up with. Most people will only be reading their own appraisal and so don't need to know that you have put very similar words into someone else's well. I can understand that you're imagining a future problem where 20 employees get together and compare notes and feel that their appraisal comments were a 'copy paste' exercise but this isn't really likely to happen.

I think you may struggle to get ChatGPT to spit out 20 variations on the same theme anyway. If you've got bullet points, it would be more respectful of your employees to write a shorter, personalised appraisal than a longer, boilerplate one.

@Workshysharon you are over thinking this. You need to tailor to each employee but using same/similar phrasing is perfectly fine. After all there are only so many ways you can say the same thing.

I suppose if you were considering this, you could ask your LM to trial it with you - one using AI and one writing it themselves and then reviewing the results together.

I probably am overthinking it, but appraisal time is the worse time of year for me. I have to write 20 appraisals for people who themselves write lengthy self appraisals and also have 20 mid year conversations which tend to last one hour. In addition, I have to provide 360 feedback to colleagues. I think I have 15 left to write. Many of those are read by the same manager since to be different. I am desperate for some tools to take some of the pressure off me.

They don't HAVE to be different though!
In fact, having standardized wording is much easier. It makes appraisals fairer and more comparable.

The differentiation here has to be the detail of what each employee did, I'm presuming if there's a formal appraisal process this is some corporate job and not, say call centre/retail worker where everyone just needs to do their job and go home.

I've only ever had a maximum of 3 direct reports and appraisal time is the low point of my year. ChatGPT is an excellent idea!

And I know what I want to say but somehow really struggle to word it nicely. This is why AI exists - to assist in tasks that would otherwise take an unnecessarily long time to complete. All workplaces are using AI with innovation teams etc, would be insane not to benefit from it.

Using ChatGPT to write appraisals would make me question the point of the appraisals! Although having said that, we used to have a 20-page performance measurement document and I’d have seriously considered using it to help me fill that out - beyond tedious.

In my humble opinion most appraisals are just arse covering.
Performance should be managed throughout the year, any issues/praise etc given immediately.

Agreed @sixpiacksally.

Chat GPT can definitely do this (don’t ask me how I know 🤣).

however, I don’t think it will save quite as much time as you hope as you have to give it very very specific prompts and edit it carefully for it to still be meaningful for your employees and not obvious what you’ve done.

it can help when you’ve got a mental block though. You need ChatGPT 4.0 though as 3.5 won’t give the kind of quality you need

@sixpiacksally agreed but you do need a formal record as well.

Can I ask how you would feel if your manager gave you an appraisal they decided to short cut writing using ChatGPT?

Undervalued, not seen, not worth the time and effort, throw the details into a computer because the manager had better things to do.

I know you are looking for help when you are struggling but if I found out my manager had done this I wouldn't be with company long.

Instead reach out to another manager for guidance or support in writing them. They may have ideas or format that may help. By format I am thinking - review of their year, 2-4 positive points, 1-2 areas for growth or development followed by an overall assement paragraph- or something similar that works for you organisation.

Yes deffo. Write a bullet point list for each person then ask ChatGPT to turn it into a concise paragraph then refine it a few times.

it will make it sooooo much easier

try it ! Then email it to yourself and cut and paste into the system

My company launched an in house AI this year and appraisals are one of the areas I have found it useful for. I make very detailed notes first, in bullet point form, and then usually do a few iterations of how I ask it to summarise them to refine the output to the format needed.

I do then reword the output further so it sounds human and more in my voice. I do not reuse the same content for another of my direct reports - but I keep the prompts saved and then use a new set of bullet points.

Like many things it can be used effectively or incredibly poorly. The important thing is that the output is personalised and thoroughly checked by the manager.

I also wouldn't put any personal or company data into chatGPT. But we are encouraged to explore ways we can use our in house AI.

This is the answer I was hoping for 😅☺️