Performance review time is a good time for any company to evaluate the worth of its workers. As a business manager you should know that not all of them will work the same way due to their differences in intelligence, skill sets, educational background, upbringing, values and home environment. Perhaps you are familiar with each one of them, and pointing out their strengths and weaknesses has become second nature to you, but have you ever stopped to consider if these reviews have any impact at all?
Even as you zero in on their pros and cons, do you think you are evaluating your workers in a way that is actually useful to your company?
A review will serve its purpose, unless the following is happening:
1. Managers are not giving honest or fair assessments
There are many things that can impair the judgment of an evaluator. Such as his personal relationship or familiarity with the employee, how long that employee has been working with the company and even the rumors the evaluator hears about the said employee. Those in charge of evaluations can also fall into the bad habit of giving false or blanket performance review comments because he or she is running out of time.
Finally, managers who can’t make tough evaluations fall into this category as well. Are you afraid to call out someone on his or her shortcomings?
2. Inconsistency among evaluators
This often results when more than one manager is assigned to evaluate workers and they are using different standards. If no consensus is reached regarding the employee’s work habits, it’s challenging to tell the employee to fix something without agreement on what needs to change. You can also have situations where an employee is rated on completely different ends of the scale.
How do I fix this?
Assign one person to review the employee to ensure a fair employee evaluation. The one person performing the review can get feedback from other managers to incorporate into the performance review process.
3. Your feedback is not impacting employees
When you give feedback to your staff, are you being honest and providing thorough feedback with positive performance reviews and negative feedback? It can be easy to fall back to vague comments without specific examples to help an employee improve.
How do I fix this?
Be more direct with your feedback and provide specific examples of situations where an employee exceeded, met, or didn’t meet the expectations.
4. Employees are not willing to change
Once the employees have been told where they are strongest and weakest-is the company following up on any improvements? Are they constantly reminding employees what has to be altered and are they providing the necessary incentive or deterrents?
5. Lack of communication
Change can also be hindered by a lack of communication. Perhaps there are some reasons behind those shortcomings that the company is not aware of? Progress doesn’t stop with the management telling the employees what to do, period.
Let’s say your company does give fair and consistent reviews. Perhaps the feedback is reaching your employees and they do strive to make changes and tell the company about their issues. So why is no improvement? Have you ever stopped to think it might not be the process that is flawed, but the instrument used to gauge your employees?
What instrument are you using to evaluate your employees? Do you have a set of standard questions you use to determine how good they are at work or is your company using generalized performance appraisal phrases that yield vague answers?
If the answer is yes then it’s about time you standardized your evaluation tool. There are now companies that offer templates with performance review phrases designed to give the managers as much information as they should know about the working habits of their employees while at the same time giving the employee the high-quality feedback they should be getting.
Now is the right time to do this. Look up what employee evaluation examples you should be using. The right questions can go a long way to evaluating the performance of an employee and the right phrases can go even further to inspire an employee to improve.
