Performance evaluations, which provide employers with an opportunity to assess their employees’ contribution to the organization, are critical to building a powerful workforce. A well-designed employee evaluation form is a highly effective tool in helping both employees and employers identify employees’ areas of strength and weakness.
While the employee evaluation form is paramount in boosting productivity, only a marginal number of employees say that their organization does it well. A poorly drafted employee evaluation form is often the root cause of an ineffective appraisal process.
KEY POINTS
- An employee evaluation form can motivate a team to do their best by recognizing their strengths and improving communication.
- Evaluations should be conducted fairly and consistently to protect your employees.
- An effective performance evaluation system has standardized performance measures, evaluation forms, and feedback guidelines.
Anatomy of a perfect employee evaluation form:
Before you start going over every performance management software available, take the time to review your current system and find out what it lacks. Then, take note of your requirements and determine if a new system will be helpful and accelerate your work. Refer to this checklist as your guide:
Define participants and appropriate evaluators
Define the participants, their job roles, and assign appropriate evaluators as it is a crucial step in assessing employees based on their merits and responsibilities. Identify employees’ reporting managers, peer groups, and other stakeholders who can leave feedback for the employee. Organizing employee groups into appropriate team names and tags can help you better manage the performance reviews.
Results and goals, use appropriate rating scales
Defining results and goals allows you to evaluate an employee’s job performance objectively and drastically cut down on the amount of time and stress involved in designing and filling out the evaluation form. The inclusion of behavioral competencies can give you a more holistic view of employee’s performance. Although defining these criteria can be one of the more time-consuming parts of creating a form, it’s also one of the most powerful. Use of rating scales which are neither too short or long can garner maximum responses and help you analyse data more effectively.
A good example of the appropriate rating scale
Unacceptable | Performance was consistently below expectations, and reasonable progress towards goals was not made. Significant improvement is needed. |
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Needs | Performance failed to meet expectations and employees need better understanding of the undertaken projects. |
Meets expectations | Performance met expectations in terms of efficiency, timeliness, and quality of work. The most critical goals were met. |
Exceeds expectations | All goals and objectives were achieved above the expected performance parameters. |
Exceptional | Performance exceeded expectations. An extraordinary level of achievement and commitment in terms of technical skills, knowledge, initiative, and creativity is achieved. |
Schedule the evaluation
Once you’ve built your employee evaluation form, you just need to decide when to conduct the performance evaluations. It is advisable that businesses use quarterly or monthly assessments to enhance the efficiency of the review. In addition to scheduled reviews, enabling continuous feedback can aid in evaluating employees’ performance in real-time.
However you choose to schedule the evaluations, it is important to ensure that each evaluator consistently meets the deadline by assigning a due date for the assessments. Overdue evaluations will make employees feel devalued and may hurt performance.
Choose a launch date when it captures the attention of your employees. For example, you can send the evaluation form on a Monday morning when employees are more alert. You can also give a precise due date and provide clarity about the timeline.
Completing the review
Once you have sent out evaluation invites, ensure that the following steps are implemented to enhance its effectiveness.
- Email the evaluation invite and send push notifications on employee’s cell phones to give them instant access to complete the evaluation without the need of logging into their account.
- Offer an option to complete the evaluation anonymously. Canceling it or sending it to other colleagues in the team empowers your evaluators.
- A one-click selection on KPIs with an option to include notes and select emoticons gives evaluators a quick and easy way to evaluate employees.
- Before sending the evaluation, the evaluator should have the option to send out the form to colleagues to get their inputs.
- Offer an easy signature module so evaluators can sign the evaluation and finish the process. Completed evaluations can be printed or emailed.
Create a powerful employee performance evaluation
Designing the perfect employee evaluation form doesn’t have to be a tedious and challenging task. It starts when you decide to pick the right software to help you deliver the results. Unlike other all-in-one HR suites, AssessTEAM delivers performance evaluation templates that can be customized to fit around your unique business process. Once configured, our evaluation templates can automatically trigger your (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or annual) scheduled reviews and allows for broader participation from various stakeholders for a more holistic view of employees’ performance.