Evaluating Employees

Do your employees know how you rate their performance? Do you have a policy of conducting regular reviews? Employees need to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses, and know whether they’re meeting your expectations. If you haven’t conducted a formal employee evaluation in the last six months, now is the time to assess your team’s responsibilities, adherence to policies and procedures, and overall achievement.

Assessing the quality of a person’s work is not easy. You have to know which areas to evaluate, as well as determine a method use. A simple three-stop process to help evaluate existing employee job performances can help. The steps are: create a results-oriented job description; develop a weighting-scoring model; and use weighting-scoring model to evaluate employee.

Be clear on what the review is meant to accomplish. An employee’s first evaluation usually occurs at the end of his 90-day probationary period; thereafter, evaluations are typically given annually. However, all reviews should determine how well the employee is meeting company standards, as well as rate and general performance.

Creating a Results-Oriented Job Description

Many job descriptions are poorly written. They are vague, do not establish specific goals, and do not convey the most basic information to the employee. Consequently, there is a gap in basic perceptions about what a manager and employee view as the job from the very beginning of the business relationship. This can create doubt and apprehension, which can destroy a partnership. This situation is clarified by creating results-oriented job descriptions.

To develop a results-oriented job description, the major job functions or duties of the job must be specified. A simple job description is clear and concise. It should be broken down into simple, understandable language and clear, attainable goals. A rule of thumb is that, in general, a job description should be no more than two pages.

Also helpful in this process is to have the employee participate in the creation of his or her job description. Ask an open-ended question to an existing employee. What is your job? Have the employee write down, in his own words, what he does on the job. Chances are, it will be different from what the formal job description is, assuming there is a formal job description. A manager can learn a great deal by giving an employee this opportunity.

Reassess the employee’s job description and use that to motivate the employee. Simply incorporate some of the points you discovered when you had the employee write down his own job description. Meet with the employee and explain that you want to rewrite his job description using his input on some issues. This is a major selling point for the job description because it gives the manager the opportunity to break bread with the employee. When all is said and done, both the manger and the employee should sign the job description, which solidifies the job description as a contract.

Employee evaluation is an ongoing periodic process; it should not be considered a dreaded annual managerial process, which is how it is typically viewed. Employees need constant feedback to perform their jobs effectively. Leave space for the employee to write comments about the review process. He may wish to disagree with your assessments or declare a willingness to achieve certain goals.

It is easy to create an employee evaluation weighting-scoring form directly from a job description, because the functions in the job description become the scoring criteria for the model. Then determine the importance of the criteria in the weighting-scoring model. Specifying the importance of the criteria is the weighting portion of the weighting-scoring model. The manager assigns a weight of importance to each criterion, which in turn denotes its rank. Once the form is complete, you should both sign it and each party should retain a copy for their records. A word on salaries: Annual reviews do not mean an automatic increase in pay; however, if the employee is doing a good job, a raise is customary in most industries.

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