Getting the most out of your employees is a never-ending struggle. You may be able to find talented employees to handle the work, but there’s always the chance of people falling behind on work or you making a mistake and hiring someone inexperienced. That’s why 98% of organizations say that performance management is vital.
Of all your tools to manage employee performance, employee evaluations are one of your best ones. It gives you a chance to let people know what they’re great at doing and what they need to work on. But handling evaluations is easier said than done.
If you’re struggling to handle employee evaluations, this post will help. Keep reading to learn the steps to take to conduct employee reviews properly.
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Prepare Feedback Before the Review
The last thing you want to do on an employee review is wing the feedback you provide. Yes, the review interview may be more freeform. But you don’t want to think on the fly when you describe how well an employee performs.
Look carefully at someone’s performance over time well ahead of review time. You want enough time to learn the good and bad points of an employee’s performance.
Your goal is to give them a clear picture of what’s going on — and that’s hard to do if you don’t come into the review without a feedback plan.
Check Previous Employee Reviews
One of the goals of an employee review is to check how someone performs over time. No, you won’t be able to do this if someone is new and hasn’t been reviewed before. But that won’t be the case for many of your employees.
Check out the previous reviews a person has before the interview. You want to see what someone was like in the past and what issues they needed to work on.
You can use the current review to bring up the progress someone has made. If someone has done good work and gotten better, let them know they did well. If they still have work to do in other areas, let them know that too.
Make sure you’re crystal clear about how much someone has come along since they started working for your organization.
Create a Routine Employee Evaluation
It might be tempting to do employee evaluations at random. You want to keep employees on their toes, so you don’t give them any indication that a review is coming up.
The problem with doing this is that you aren’t giving employees time to prepare. This review isn’t only for them. It’s also for you to learn the issues an employee has and anything they are having trouble with.
Ensuring people know when reviews are happening will help you do this. It will give people time to prepare themselves and create talking points they want to bring up.
Keep the Conversation Two-Way
An employee evaluation shouldn’t just involve you speaking the entire time. Yes, you will need to talk a lot to let employees know what their performance is like. But feedback isn’t as good if the person listening can’t ask for further information.
Your employee evaluations should be a conversation between managers and employees. Your employees should feel comfortable speaking up in the performance review whenever they have something to say.
This is especially important if something in the evaluation is wrong. Managers make mistakes sometimes, so it’s essential for employees to set the record straight.
Getting feedback like this also gives your managers a way to get feedback about things that may not work well at your company. Use this time to gather a list of issues and work on fixing them.
Provide Actionable Feedback
An employee evaluation isn’t worth much if your employee can’t get anything from it. Getting a bonus or pay raise is nice, but how does an employee use what you tell them to get better and improve their careers?
Spend some time creating feedback for your employees. Look at the things they can improve on to see if you can come up with any ideas for them to improve.
If possible, reach out to other people to get ideas. When you work with your team to help everyone succeed, everyone will become smarter, do better work, and build a better company.
Don’t Focus on Negative
Most people enjoy hearing nothing but negative feedback. They want to know that they are doing great work and are valuable because of it. But it’s hard to get that impression when you hear nothing but complaints in your feedback session.
Make sure to also focus on the things an employee does well. Bring a list of all an employee’s accomplishments to the evaluation and let them know where they did excellent work.
Doing this will help build your employees’ confidence and help them feel better about working on some of their weak points.
Reward Great Work
Money is a big motivator when it comes to doing great work. But it isn’t the only factor people consider when thinking about employee happiness. They also want to feel valued and appreciated for their work.
An employee recognition program will help you do this. You can create awards, offer bonuses, plan company trips, and other activities.
You can also use an employee recognition platform that makes things easier to organize. Look into the recognition options available to see which fits your business best.
Take Employee Evaluations Seriously
You can only get so far by assigning tasks to your employees and calling it a day. People need something to strive towards and need to understand the progress they are making. It’s hard to do this when you aren’t conducting employee evaluations to let people know how they are doing.
But there is a right and wrong way to conduct routine employee evaluations. Follow the guidelines above when looking at employee performance to gauge your team members’ efforts and give them the feedback they need to improve.
Of course, you need more than employee evaluations to properly manage a team. Check out the blog for more tips on managing a company.