How to Create the Perfect Employee Performance Evaluation Process

Preparing for and carrying out employee performance evaluations can be a time-consuming business for employees, line managers, and the HR team in an organization. With performance appraisal forms to complete, employee feedback to gather, ratings to decide on, and meetings and write-ups to deal with, what should be a value-adding and worthwhile activity can feel like a meaningless and labor-intensive process.

Checklist to Create the Perfect Employee Performance Evaluation

It’s imperative that your organization equips itself with powerful tools to keep employee performance evaluations as straightforward as possible to reap the great benefits they can offer your employees and your business as a whole. Here are some great tips and ideas on how to streamline and improve your company’s performance appraisals.

1. Focus on objectives

One of the most effective ways of encouraging and supporting your employees to perform well is to work with them to create meaningful goals that they can work towards during the review period (usually a year). SMART objectives are commonly used in this area–this acronym is an excellent way of ensuring that any goal that is set meets the criteria of being specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

Objectives that are too vague in terms of how success is measured, or even too easy or too difficult to achieve, are not good ways of motivating employees to drive good performance.

2. Beware of setting too many performance goals

It can be tempting to link driving good performance by giving your employees multiple performance goals to achieve throughout the year. But this can sometimes be counterproductive, as it runs the risk of overwhelming the individual with too many unrealistic or unachievable things to work on. Focusing on a handful of important targets with measurable goals can be a much more effective way of harnessing your employee’s natural enthusiasm and motivation.

It’s also really important for managers and employees to have regular meetings to check progress against objectives and to make changes or give additional support where required. This helps to ensure that the process stays on track.

3. Be transparent about performance expectations

During the employee performance evaluation, the line manager should be prepared to hold an honest and two-way conversation with a team member, giving both positive and constructive feedback about his or her performance. It’s crucial that the line manager gives advice and direction that is clear and unambiguous so that employees have all of the information that they need to improve in their role.

To ensure clarity, it’s also a good idea to follow up the meeting with a written summary of what was discussed and what actions were agreed upon, that can be reviewed together at subsequent meetings.

4. Don’t neglect giving positive feedback

It can be easy for a line manager to focus so much on the opportunities for improvement that they forget to provide their employee with enough clear and specific positive feedback. Giving praise and encouragement is absolutely critical if you want your team member to achieve well in the future. They need to know that their achievements have been appreciated, and it will give a renewed passion and motivation to drive themselves further.

Ask for feedback from the employee’s peers, customers, or other individuals that they deal with regularly and try to make the feedback that you give as specific as possible.

Revolutionization of Employee Performance Evaluations

With so many factors to consider and steps to carry out in the employee performance evaluation, it’s no wonder that many line managers and employees don’t relish the process, or even get the most out of it.

Adding automation to your company’s performance appraisal method can offer you great benefits since it can dramatically reduce the amount of time that your teams spend on it. Kissflow HR Cloud’s innovative and intuitive performance appraisal app offers its users template performance management forms that can be customized to meet your organization’s requirements and can be completed online and sent to the relevant parties involved in the process for maximum ease.

Gathering feedback has never been easier with Kissflow HR Cloud’s feedback tool that allows line managers to request and analyze feedback for their employees. It also ensures greater clarity and consistency across different team members, employee performance evaluations, and scores/ratings.

Furthermore, Kissflow HR Cloud’s employee performance evaluation app provides reminders to line managers and employees to keep the process on track. It even arranges performance meetings and tracking outcomes.

Reach Your Goals

Don’t let your teams get weighed down by the amount of work to do within the employee performance evaluation process. By using automation, your line managers and HR team can make sure that their performance evaluations are consistent, objective, focused, and fruitful, all with minimum effort.