Employee evaluation: Benefits, tips and examples
Employee evaluation is a necessary process that helps employees grow, improve and feel supported. Learn here how to effectively evaluate employees.
An employee evaluation is a performance review involving an employee and their direct manager that is conducted regularly throughout an employee’s tenure with a company. Some companies use monthly employee evaluations to measure progress, while others opt for an annual review structure.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of employee evaluations, outline how to conduct effective ones and demonstrate how companies can use this performance feedback to improve performance.
Benefits of employee evaluations
Regular employee evaluations help HR teams understand how employees perform, whether they feel supported in their roles and how to support their career development. Beyond just being an opportunity to discuss performance, evaluations can help shape an employee’s career and contribute to high levels of job satisfaction.
Employee evaluations are also the perfect medium for employee recognition, allowing managers to highlight employees’ important work and its impact on the company.
Employee evaluations have several benefits:
- Improved job satisfaction: Employees who receive positive feedback from their managers are more likely to feel satisfied at work.
- Boosted productivity: Higher employee job satisfaction rates translate into increased employee engagement. Engaged employees are motivated, focused and willing to give 100%.
- Enhanced career opportunities: Employee evaluations allow employees to discuss their plans and visions for their careers and tenure with a company. Managers can help plan a pathway for employees to develop their roles.
- Positive mental health impact: If you notice a decrease in performance over a certain period of time, an employee evaluation can provide an opportunity for you to discuss this with an employee. Showing support for your team and seeking solutions to any problems that they may have will improve employee mental health and contribute to a stronger workplace culture.
- Identify training areas: If an employee is underperforming in certain aspects of their work, you can use employee evaluations to guide them towards training opportunities that will help them improve.
Across the board, employee evaluations can contribute to a productive, supportive and enjoyable workplace.
How to conduct an employee evaluation
Although employee evaluation meetings can have numerous benefits, poor execution can turn them into negative experiences that employees dread.
Here are a few steps to follow when conducting your employee evaluations:
Distribute employee self-evaluations
Before launching an employee evaluation, checking in with your employees and seeing how they feel about their recent performance is always a good idea. Self-guided evaluations can help you gain a better understanding of performance from your employee’s perspective.
Send out an employee self-evaluation form, including questions such as:
- What were your key accomplishments during this review period? Please include specific examples and data, where possible.
- How did you make progress towards your goals during this review period?
- What are your goals for the next review period?
- What support do you need from your manager or broader team to achieve these goals?
A self-evaluation form should allow employees to share honest thoughts about their performance and any factors that may have had an impact on it throughout the review period. Using questions that help to check whether or not an employee feels supported by your organisation will help you understand their recent levels of work.
Self-evaluations also allow employees to share with their managers or evaluator any specific training opportunities that they’re interested in or development needs that they may have.
Related reading: Top questions for employee self-evaluation: Examples and tips.
Train managers for evaluations
Managers can make or break an employee evaluation. A well-trained manager will conduct the evaluation in a way that shares employee feedback without criticising or patronising the employee.
Being a manager requires a great deal of empathy and tact. Training can provide them with the skills they need to share vital and sensitive information in a way that benefits the employee. If an employee’s performance has declined, managers should be able to contribute to a solution and support the employee during an improvement plan rather than making them feel upset.
Whether the manager is new to the company or role or not, they should still undergo training focused on employee evaluations. They’ll need to understand how to give an assessment that reflects the company’s policies, guidelines and values.
After managers have completed their evaluation training, you can send a post-training survey to measure the effectiveness of the sessions and identify areas for improvement.
Draft an employee evaluation
Writing an employee evaluation is an important part of the process. Although the one-to-one meeting will be the main focus of the evaluation, a written document can be useful for the employee’s and manager’s records as well as for tracking changes over time.
You don’t have to start from scratch when drafting an employee evaluation. Pre-built templates can streamline the evaluation process and make performance reviews easy. You can also use performance review surveys to identify the main areas that you should cover in your evaluation.
Typically, you should split an employee evaluation into the following areas:
- Performance highlights
- Collaboration and teamwork
- Goals and achievements
- Improvements for the next period
- Future career development
- Employee support and check-in
Some of these areas of your performance report will require information from the employee themself. That’s where their self-evaluation comes in.
Gather feedback about employee performance reviews
A 360-degree employee performance review survey will offer colleagues the opportunity to give their team members feedback. These surveys work on different hierarchical levels, allowing employees to give their managers feedback and vice versa. A 360-degree performance review will measure everything from collaboration and teamwork to productivity and attitude at work.
Collecting data using this type of employee performance review will help you form a holistic picture of an employee. If you only collect data from one manager, their personal opinions could skew the data and lead to an excessively favourable or unfavourable review. If you ask every connected team member for their opinion, you will form a more honest and complete picture of an employee.
Make sure you utilise other employee feedback forms to help you create the best-possible employee evaluations.
Related reading: Creating an effective employee feedback culture
Track and improve employee performance with SurveyMonkey
Employee feedback is closely linked to performance, satisfaction and employee churn. If your business invests in creating a feedback culture where you regularly share evaluations with employees, you will establish a strong foundation for all of your employees.
With SurveyMonkey, you can rapidly collect data, allow employees to share their opinions and transform your performance management process over time.
Frequently asked questions
- Q: What is an employee evaluation?
- Q: How often should you conduct an employee evaluation?
- Q: What is the most effective way to conduct an employee evaluation?
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