What is a performance evaluation process?
Employee Performance evaluation is a key process to ensure that employees are performing right and where they can improve. As an HR professional, you can evaluate employees on a quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly basis. Performance evaluation is a formal and productive process to measure an employee’s workability on their assigned job. The idea behind employee performance evaluation is to calculate the total value that an employee adds to the company’s business revenue. By annually reviewing employees' performance, employers can promote them or offer bonuses which in turn boost employee morale.
What is the purpose of performance evaluation?
Performance Evaluation serves several purposes. The main objective of it is to improve check whether the employee’s output is by the industry norms. It also helps to uplift the overall productivity of the organization.
# Periodic performance evaluation is a report card of an employee from his reporting manager who acknowledges the work has done in a specific time. It includes the scope for improvement.
# An employer can provide consistent feedback on an employee’s strengths and strive for improvement in the areas that the employees need to work on.
# It is an integrated platform for both the employee and employer to attain common ground on what both think is befitting a quality performance. This helps in improving communication, which usually leads to better and more accurate team metrics and, thus, improved performance results.
# The goal of this entire process of performance evaluation is to improve the way a team or an organization functions, to achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
# A manager should evaluate the team member regularly and not just once a year. This way, the team can avert new and unexpected problems with constant work being done to improve competence and efficiency.
# Management can conduct frequent employee training and skill development sessions based on the development areas recognized after a performance evaluation session.
# The management can effectively manage the team and conduct productive resource allocation after evaluating the goals and preset standards of performance.
# Regular performance evaluation can help determine the scope of growth in an employee’s career and the level of motivation with which he/she contributes towards the success of an organization.
# Performance evaluation lets an employee understand where does he stand as compared to others in the organization.
What are the ideal questions that should be present in an employee evaluation form?
Performance evaluation forms play an integral role in providing periodic feedback to employees so that they are more aware of their own performance metrics. The ideal questions for employee evaluation forms can be broadly categorized into the following.
Job satisfaction
1. What motivates you every day to get your job done well?
2. What are the daily tasks that you enjoy the most and why?
3. What are the tasks that you don’t enjoy at all and why?
4. What are the five major things that the company can do better?
Company leadership
1. Do you think the leadership in the company treats all employees fairly?
2. What are the leadership qualities that you believe you have?
3. Give an example of a situation at work when you were able to effectively use your leadership skills?
4. Do you think that there is effective communication between the leadership and employees of the company?
5. If you were in a leadership position in the company, what advice would you give to the employees?
Value addition
1. What are the things that you did in the last year which helped contribute to the overall success of the organization?
2. What are your views about work recognition?
3. Are you able to receive regular feedback from your peers and managers?
4. How many time-sensitive projects were you able to handle in the last year?
5. Do you feel valued for working in the company?
Workplace culture
1. In the last year, did you propose any changes to the company procedures or policies?
2. How often are you able to communicate with your managers or peers?
3. Do you often help your peers to successfully complete their assigned tasks?
4. Have you had any uncomfortable or unpleasant discussions with your team members or the manager?
5. Are there any changes that you would want to incorporate in the office to make the workplace culture more positive?
What are the end goals of the performance evaluation process?
Motivating employees
When your employees are clear about the outputs that are expected from them, they are able to perform better at their jobs. Periodic performance evaluation motivates the employees to give their best because they know that their managers will be carefully analyzing all their hard work.
Providing feedback for improvement
Performance evaluation is like an employee’s report card which acknowledges their work and scope for improvement as well. Consistent feedback allows employees to see where they can improve.
Improving internal processes
Regular employee evaluation helps organizations understand how their employees work on an everyday basis and what they can do to improve the overall employee efficiency. Based on the feedback received from the employees, company leaders, and department heads can modify and optimize internal business processes to ensure that employees can work and collaborate seamlessly.
Maintaining an honest appraisal process
The employee performance evaluation offers a clear metric for non-discriminatory appraisals. Department heads and managers can refer to the performance evaluation documentation of every employee to analyze how much work they were able to accomplish and offer them promotions and recognitions accordingly.
Few top tips for effective performance evaluations are as follows:
1. Have a both-way discussion
Whenever the employee’s performance is being discussed, managers should ensure that the discussion is two-way. Involving employees in job performance evaluation improves the overall process since the managers can get a clear idea of how the employees handle their work and how the company can help them become more productive.
After all, the entire goal of a performance management process is to help employees improve and perform better at their jobs.
2. Start with employee self-appraisals
Employees can be asked to fill up self-appraisal forms that are similar to the performance evaluation forms which their managers have to fill up before going into the performance review meeting. When both the employee and manager have clear answers for all their relevant performance-related questions, it’s easier to have a smooth discussion.
3. Constructive and clear feedback
As part of the employee evaluation, you should get 360-degree feedback of the employees from their team members, bosses, and any other reporting staff to get a better idea about the employee’s performance.
You can have informal discussions to obtain the feedback or even consider developing a format for the feedback forms that can be easily shared with everyone.
What are the various Performance evaluation methods?
There are various critical performance evaluation methods. Using only one of these performance evaluation methods might help an organization merely gain one-sided information while using multiple of these methods to help in obtaining insights from various perspectives, which will be instrumental in forming an unbiased and performance-centric decision.
1. Self-evaluation
This is an amazing method to get started with employee reviews. Self-evaluation is when an employee is expected to rate themselves using multiple-choice or open-ended questions by keeping in mind some evaluation criteria. After conducting self-evaluation, the management has an opportunity to fairly assess an employee by considering his/her thoughts about their performance.
An organization’s management can compare every employee’s self-evaluation with the rating his/her manager provides, which makes the performance evaluation process exhaustive and effective. The gap between self-evaluated ratings and the supervisor’s ratings can be discussed to maintain a certain level of transparency.
2. 360-degree employee evaluation
In this performance evaluation method, an employee is rated in terms of the advancements made by him/her within the team as well as with external teams. Inputs from supervisors of different departments are considered along with evaluation done by direct supervisors and immediate peers too. Thus, in 360-degree feedback, each employee is rated for the job done according to their job description as well as the work done by them in association with other teams.
3. Graphics rating scale
This is one of the most widely used performance evaluation methods by supervisors. Numeric or text values corresponding to values from poor to excellent can be used in this scale, and parallel evaluation of multiple team members can be conducted using this graphical scale. Employee skills, expertise, conduct, and other qualities, in comparison to others in a team, can be evaluated. It is important to make each employee understand the value of each entity of the scale in terms of success and failure. This scale should ideally be the same for each employee.
4. Developmental checklists
Every organization has a certain roadmap for each employee for their developments as well as exhibited behavior. This method of maintaining a checklist for development is one of the most straightforward performance evaluation methods. This checklist has several dichotomous questions, answers to which need to be positive. If not, then the employee requires some developmental training in the areas where he/she needs improvement.
5. Demanding events checklist
There are events in each employee’s career with an organization where he/she has to exhibit immense skill and expertise. An intelligent manager always tends to keep a demanding events list where employees show good or bad qualities.
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