Some organizations don’t do any employee reviews or evaluations, this can drastically harm an organization. Some organizations only do a yearly employee review, this can be highly inaccurate. An organization needs to track often how its employees are doing. When you identify the best employees and help them grow the whole organization grows. To find other top ways to create a good work environment read my previous article.
Creating an easy employee review process depends on speed, simplicity, high frequency, and trackability. Employees and managers should enjoy the process or at least not dread it.
Speed
Managers or the people that create employee reviews seem to think that the review must be pages long with a lot of written detail. This is not true. If you are only doing one or two reviews per year this makes it even harder to fill out.
A supervisor or manager should be able to fill out a review in about one to five minutes. This way the supervisor can get through tens of reviews in a few hours or do a few each day. Ideally, a supervisor would do a couple of reviews each week so that by the end of each month they have reviewed their whole team.
Simplicity
The questions may be important in the employee review but the way they are answered can be simple.
To start, make the review only half a page long consisting of three to five questions. These questions can be used for all employees and job types. So, that means making the questions a little general.
The supervisor then simply writes the employee’s name, date, and then circles an answer for each question. The answers are simple 0 to 4 or Yes and No. You can leave one or two blank lines for limited notes. You are purposefully leaving little space to write to keep it simple.
High Frequency
We are biased by the recent history that we can easily remember. So, a long review will not be accurate about the details of six to twelve months ago. Recently an employee may have been sick, so arriving late often but ten months ago they had an amazing idea that saved the organization money. A supervisor may be upset, thinking only of the current issues forgetting or omitting good things from the past. Short reviews more often are better.
Supervisors should be doing a review monthly for all current employees. For new employees still on probation, a review can be done weekly. These frequencies will allow the supervisors the ability to gauge performance regularly and detect issues right away. The idea is that training and corrective action can be given sooner before issues become big problems.
Trackability
Each question’s answers in the review should be assigned some sort of number rating. Then all the answers can be added up and converted into a percentage. This percentage will be tracked. Over time the supervisor will get a sense of how the employee is doing. Additionally, all employees can be ranked and rated against each other.
This will allow the supervisors to determine their lowest-rated employee for the month. This is now an opportunity to give support and additional training before they become a problem employee.
Also, check to see if an employee’s rating keeps going down over time, say about six to twelve months. This is only a problem if you have been honestly giving them extra support during this time. Now, you can identify if an employee needs to change positions within the organization or be let go.
If the employee is a very nice person but just can’t get a hang of the role, you may consider helping them move to another organization. At the very least give them an appropriate reference letter.
Moving Forward
Now that you understand the easy employee review process, you need to create the actual evaluation form. Deciding on the questions may be easy or hard depending on your organization.
After creating your new easy employee review process, you should also consider using a new disciplinary process that is centred around support and training. Read my article “The New Disciplinary Process” to learn more.
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