If you want to know more about the Easy Employee Review Process read my previous article. This is a follow-up to that article.
To create an easy employee evaluation form, you need to put some thought into primarily what questions you will use. The questions should be simple, general, consistent, matter, and scorable so they can be tracked. In this article, I will guide you through these different areas.
Simple Questions
Don’t make your questions long or complicated. Every supervisor or manager with every level of education and experience should understand the questions for the roles they supervise. These questions should also be relevant for every role in your organization.
Example: “Does the employee complete tasks on time?”
General Questions
You will be using the same questions for all evaluations for all roles. This may make it hard sometimes, but the nature of work can be general if you think at a higher level. The example question above is general enough that a salesperson, a janitor, or an engineer can all be rated with this question.
Consistent Questions
To compare individual results evaluation to evaluation, your questions must be the same. Changing the questions will not allow you to get the data you need to properly rate and understand which employees need support. The simple and general questions above will help you stay consistent.
Questions That Matter
Finding the right questions for your organization are important. This quest to find the questions that matter may lead you to more questions than you should use. Keep your selection of questions to four or five on your evaluation.
What areas matter for your organization? Try to lean hard on performance-based or office culture questions because these are about helping your organization to perform better and work together better as a whole.
Example: “How well does the employee contribute and work with the team?”
Scoreable Questions
The questions you decide on need to be answerable quickly by the supervisors. Witten answers are not advisable as they take longer. The supervisors should simply be able to circle an answer. So, each question should have a simple rating system or be yes/no.
Warning: When you are training your supervisors on these easy evaluations, they need to understand the extreme nature of the lowest and highest ratings.
Lowest Rating
Giving the lowest rating means that the supervisor has a lot of support to give before the next evaluation. The lowest rating is only for the worst-performing person. If rated the lowest multiple times, then this person may be let go or moved to a different position if they’re given a lot of support, but they still don’t improve.
Highest Rating
The highest rating for each question is for the absolute best employees that you consider to be rock stars. The truth is, that most employees are just middle of the road or good employees. Only a small few are considered rock stars. If a supervisor is consistently giving the highest rating for an employee, then that means they think soon this employee will deserve a merit pay raise or promotion.
Yes or No
Yes or no questions are simply scored as 0 or 1.
Example Ratings
Here is how I would set up the two example questions from above:
- Does the employee complete tasks on time? 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
- How well does the employee contribute to and work with the team? 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
The supervisor simply circles the rating based on the rating legend below.
Ratings Legend
- 0 = Lowest or no performance, needs massive support, must improve before next evaluation
- 1 = Low performance, needs support
- 2 = Average performance, ask if they need support
- 3 = Good performance, consider pay raise or promotion if this high for 6-12 months
- 4 = Best performance, consider pay raise or promotion if this high for 3-6 months
Total Score
The numbered answers are added up to get a total. Divide the total score by the total possible score to get your percentage. This percentage can then be tracked. The example questions above would be score/8 = percentage.
Tracking
The percentage is tracked on a spreadsheet or any system/program that allows the supervisors, managers, or human resources to see changes over time. Ideally, the scores should stay between 50% and 75% over time. This indicates an average or good employee.
If the percentage goes down and stays below 50% then you need to give that employee more support, move them to a more suitable position, or let them go.
If the percentage goes up and stays above 75% then you need to consider advancing this person. You may give a pay raise, advanced training, or consider them for a promotion.
The paper copy of each evaluation should go into the employee’s HR file after the supervisor has a quick one-on-one meeting to talk about the evaluation results and what type of support if any is needed. An action plan should be agreed to if support is needed.
Moving forward
Now that you have the information you need to create the easy employee evaluation form, you need to decide how often to administer it. This frequency really depends on your organization. What frequency will help you the most? To learn how often employees should be evaluated read my other article here.
This method of employee evaluation is new and creative so if you are looking for more information on traditional evaluations check out these products on Amazon.
All articles on this website were written by Ian Hopfe. Connect with Ian on LinkedIn!