As a business manager you are expected to oversee the activities of your company’s workers. You are required to hire and train employees as well as make sure each department is doing its job. You are also expected to be able to accurately pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your employees through a fair performance appraisal. Writing a performance review sounds simple enough, right? So why is it so hard to do? Don’t fret if you find the task of writing employee appraisal phrases to evaluate your coworkers daunting. It just means you are taking your work seriously and want to give as impartial an assessment as possible. Now isn’t the time to dilly-dally because you have a job to do. Get down to work and keep the following in mind.
1. Remember to assess actual performance
The boss must be familiar with the personality of an employee being evaluated and this might skew your view or him or her in a certain way. Your assessment may be affected by your characterizations of their personal traits, technical knowledge and even their behavior. Instead, focus on the employee’s work performance and how they have performed for each category of the employee evaluation.
2. Your memory of events
Don’t base your assessment on just one detail you know about a worker. Perhaps you are not familiar with the productivity of the employee to be assessed and you just fall back on the last good or bad thing you remember about him. This is especially bad if you are the type that pays attention to rumors being spread by others or have the tendency to give credence to small talk around the office.
Some managers find that creating an on-going performance log helps them remember key situations for the employee evaluation.
3. Standardized metrics
Another problem that superiors face during evaluation is that the company itself might not have a standard or metrics by which the employee appraisal is based on. In this case what the company does is usually leave it to the manager to make up his or her own assessment template on the fly. These templates are usually filled with generalized performance appraisal phrases about the employee’s punctuality, work attitude or other work traits.
4. Fear of what the employee will think
Definitely not the least of a business manager’s problems come assessment time is his or her fear to make a harsh judgment. It’s inherent in our nature (well, for most of us) to want to avoid confrontation or conflict. This might ultimately lead you to overlook another person’s shortcomings or pretend these don’t exist at all. You have to realize that as supervisor you have certain tasks that might seem unsavory. But remember that the company wouldn’t have put you in that position if it didn’t think you could handle being tough.
Writing the Performance Appraisal
Prepare yourself, because taking all that into consideration was the easy part. Now you have to put the assessment into words. Remember that your performance review phrases must be fair, accurate and precise. So how do you make sure you can come up with an employee evaluation that is comprehensive? When in doubt-it’s best to ask for help. Fortunately there are now many performance review examples you can use, many of them tailored by human resources experts to fit a wide range of employee types. These reviews are designed to cut down on the time it takes to conduct your assessment and also have performance review comments adapted to give your employees high-quality feedback. You may think of it as cheating but you can also look at it another way. By referring to employee evaluation examples, you are falling back on a proven system of fairly evaluating your employees. You can do a better job at it too.
