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Relative performance evaluation (RPE) is a widely practiced employee appraisal process in the services industry. In a global delivery model, teams are spread across different geographical locations. The team members work on various tasks under the guidance of different managers and at times under more than one manager for performing the same task. Such complexities make RPE of the team members quite challenging. The paper proposes a methodical step-by-step approach to simplify the evaluation process without compromising on the rigour.

RPE has followed three different approaches. First is the traditional way, wherein evaluators had a common meeting to discuss and arrive at relative evaluation and ranking of members of the peer group employees. In the second, the number of evaluators and employees in a peer group were split in to 2 subgroups. The evaluators provided independent ratings and rankings. Simple mathematical tool then derived the combined ranking. In the third approach, each evaluator evaluated each employee in the peer group and provided the relative ranking for each employee. Again, mathematical tools provided the final ranking considering inputs from all evaluators. All the three evaluation approaches were analysed through an inter-rater agreement method.

All the three approaches for evaluation provided similar results giving confidence that less time-consuming methods could be adopted by evaluators without compromising on the rigour of the evaluation. The outcome of the exercise proved effective as the complaints reaching the ombudsmen reduced as compared to the earlier years. Considerable evaluation time was also saved. The study described in this paper is carried out in a non-unionized, Indian private sector services firm. Its effectiveness in other set ups is yet to be tested.

The research is carried out in the Indian Engineering services firm operating in the Knowledge based sector. Though study results are encouraging, the adaptability of methodology across different sectors and geographies is yet to be tested. More broad based studies are needed to evaluate suitability across firms and regions.

Relative evaluation exercise is challenging for evaluators. Although openness in evaluation is desired, it also makes evaluators uncomfortable in appearing to be taking sides or being opposing a candidate's ranking. The proposed approach brings in anonymity to each evaluator without scarifying individual evaluation.

The proposed methodology can be deployed across different services industries as the proposed methodology is business domain agnostic. It can be easily ported and tailored to align with an individual organization's evaluation philosophy. The suitability and effectiveness of the method can be studied under various types of firms like manufacturing, private, public, NGO, labour oriented, etc. As the proposed method reduces efforts, the stake holders can focus on understanding the relation between employee performance measurement, employee engagement, and long-term outcomes related to employee performance evaluation.

The proposed employee evaluation method leverages inter-rater reliability and agreement tool as a consensus approach to the relative performance ranking exercise. Such an approach to relative performance ranking is original as no prior studies with such an approach are found in the existing Literature.

The objective of this paper is to investigate the digital transformation (DT) trends in higher education institutes (HEI) (from 2010 to 2023) and examine the role of upcoming technologies in the HEI and their impact on user experience and social inclusiveness.

The middle-range research method is adopted, wherein the Scopus database is used for publication searches. The bibliometric analysis is done on a dataset of 408 articles to determine research trends in DT, top-cited articles, top journals, key authors, country-wise contribution, keyword analysis, bibliographic coupling and co-occurrence analysis. Additionally, content analysis was done on 51 articles that were finally selected to identify the upcoming DT themes in HEI.

Three key themes emerged from the analysis: digital technologies (for teaching, learning, assessment and administration), user experience and social inclusiveness, based on which we propose a conceptual model for DT in HEI.

This study contributes to the ongoing studies in the following way: (1) it proposes a conceptual model for DT in HEI. (2) It provides an understanding of the impact of DT on user experience and social inclusiveness in the context of HEI. (3) It paves the way for future research by providing future research themes, future research directions and future research questions, providing a groundwork for upcoming investigations which will help researchers develop this area further.