While employee appraisal feedback is of paramount importance for identifying weaknesses and boosting productivity, only 28 percent of employees say that their company does it well. A poor employee evaluation form is often the root reason for insufficient change after the assessment.
If you are at a loss on how to make your existing performance appraisal process effective, here’s a neat guide to help you.
Purpose of an employee performance evaluation form
The employee performance evaluation form, also known as the performance review form, is a document that highlights an individual’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to workplace performance feedback. In order to stimulate positive change, employee feedback has to be tailored to the specific work each person does.
An ideal performance evaluation form:
- Must have a structured or narrative format
- Is filled with a list of statements or questions
- Can follow a written, narrative approach
- Offers a comprehensive evaluation report
- Covers aspects like role, goals, KPIs, efficiency, and more
- Needs to be personalized and role specific
To function effectively, a performance evaluation template needs to include a number of specific components. Listed below are some of the key components that a performance evaluation form needs:
1. Employee strengths
The purpose of employee feedback process is to highlight both positive and negative areas in their existing performance. But your HR will yield great results if you design your employee evaluation form to highlight an individual’s biggest strengths instead of the one that broods on what they haven’t been able to do.
2. Areas of improvement
A simple list of shortcomings is far from motivational. Instead, a good performance review form should focus on areas that an employee could potentially improve in the future. This part of the performance feedback should include specific tips for individuals to hone their current skills.
3. Score-based assessment
Some companies rely on scorecards to provide employee feedback. It’s a good tool to assess employee contribution based on a range rather than an absolute statement. A scorecard could focus on work quality, communication skills, productivity, and other specific aspect of doing a particular job.
4. Qualitative reviews
Although quantitative, score-based reviews are great, depending on an employee’s role the job success can be abstract. While it is easy to measure the performance of sales and marketing teams using numbers, quantifying the work of a designer using this technique is hard. Qualitative reviews are used to measure aspects like timeliness, teamwork, initiative, culture fit, and more.
In today’s fast-paced world, employees interact with a number of other stakeholders on a day-to-day basis to get their work done. So, in order to get a well-rounded evaluation of their performance, businesses need to take multiple perspectives like their interactions with managers, direct reports, customers, and peers into account.
6. Performance triggers
Based on the employee’s performance, organizations need to decide between rewarding and retraining the employee. Rather than doing it all manually, an ideal performance evaluation form needs to have rule-based process workflows that initiate a process based on pre-built stipulations.
7. Custom rating scales
Some businesses may use technical terms to rate an employee’s proficiency. In such cases, standard qualitative feedback parameters will be of no use. So, organizations need to have the liberty to create a custom rating scale that gauges an employee’s proficiency in terms of technical competencies.
8. Additional suggestions
Performance review feedback should make strong suggestions about what additional skills employees can attain to perform better at work. Based on the data that an employee evaluation form collects, the HR team can facilitate training and development opportunities that can strengthen the skills and competencies of the respective worker.
Employee performance evaluation form needs to be industry-specific
A cookie-cutter method of handling performance review feedback seldom works well to uplift your employees’ morale. There is little doubt that employees seek feedback from their managers. But the feedback is effective only when it’s designed to be a constructive and enriching process.
Think about your specific industry and the skills that workers need to thrive in their respective line of work. These are the essentials to put emphasis on in your employee review forms. A good employee review form in the hospitality industry isn’t the same one that will deliver results in the manufacturing sector. But the HR teams across these industries often overlook that simple fact and settle with an employee feedback form that doesn’t cut it.
Perfect appraisal evaluation feedback has to be:
Constructive – don’t put workers down, show them how to succeed.
Specific – vague statements aren’t going to help much when it comes to employee review forms and performance feedback.
Personalized – to accomplish this goal, you need to base performance feedback on individual data.
Consistent – uniform enough to give you a long-term data pattern.
Capable of achieving goals – at least until the next performance feedback cycle.
Create a powerful employee performance evaluation
Crafting the perfect employee evaluation form doesn’t have to be a challenging task. It starts from the time when you decide to pick the tool to help you run the process. Although pre-designed performance evaluation templates in packaged HR software help businesses hit the ground running, their lack of flexibility only adds to the overall complexity.
Unlike other all-in-one HR suites, Kissflow HR Cloud provides businesses with performance management templates that can be customized to fit around their unique business process. Once configured, its performance management module automatically initiates a performance evaluation process (monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or annually) that captures 360-degree qualitative feedback.
Its robust functionalities allow managers to trigger a performance improvement plan (PIP) right after the evaluation phase. Once PIP is initiated, managers can schedule training programs depending on the skill or knowledge gap. If there is no improvement after the training period, supervisors can either extend a warning letter or start an offboarding process. Best of all, it covers aspect of performance management from self-appraisals and manager evaluation to rewards program and offboarding.
Unlock the flexibility of Kissflow HR Cloud with a free trial—join HR managers who love it!
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