Employees Want a Job Performance Evaluation

Job performance evaluations should motivate employees to want to improve. They should also make employees aware of any concerns a manager has about their job performance. 

In my experience in the HR industry, employees want feedback about how they’re doing in their jobs. In fact, it’s often one of the things I’ve heard employees complain the most about—that they don’t get any regular feedback. 

Employees want to know what they’re doing well. They want to know where they can improve. They want to get better. 

Overall, I believe people want to do better and improve, and a job performance evaluation is a formal way of giving employees the regular feedback they need on their individual performance. 

Mistakes I Often See

One of the biggest mistakes I commonly see is that employers don’t know how to administer performance evaluations. There’s so much involved in the overall performance management process that employers usually don’t know all of what’s involved. The performance evaluation is more than just a form that managers fill out on their employees. It’s an entire process that starts long before the form is even created. 

From the first day on the job, employees want /need to know what’s expected of them. Unfortunately, another mistake I often see is that employers don’t take the time (or frankly, have the time) to sit with their employees when they are first hired. For various reasons, they don’t always do a good job of setting expectations and goals for employees up-front. So going forward, it makes it even more difficult to reiterate those expectations on a continual basis. 

Another mistake I’ve seen employers make is not giving regular feedback to employees. Feedback is such a critical part of the job and feedback doesn’t always have to be formal. A great deal of emphasis should be placed on providing employees with regular feedback, such as daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. A performance evaluation should never contain anything that is a surprise to an employee. When the time comes for the formal performance evaluation meeting to take place, all of the information that’s contained on the form should have already been discussed between the manager and employee. Feedback should not just be given once a year at evaluation time.   

Training (or lack thereof) is another area that I see as a common mistake when it comes to performance evaluations. Unfortunately, if managers are not trained on the performance management process and don’t know how to administer the evaluations, the whole process can become very subjective.   

Steps to Putting a Performance Management Process in Place

If an employer wants to consider putting a performance management process in place, there are some steps they should consider before training their managers on how to conduct the evaluations: 

• Look at your internal processes—Ask yourself the following questions: “Why is it that we are doing (or want to do) evaluations in the first place? Is it just because we think we should? Or because employees want it? Or is it to really improve the overall organization and the performance of the employees?
• Make sure you have current and accurate job descriptions—This is huge because that’s really the basis for employee expectations. So right from the get-go, employees know what’s expected of them. 
• You should help employees set goals for themselves—When setting goals for employees, make sure to set objective goals. Objective goals are SMART goals and SMART goals are: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-driven and Timed.
• You should review the goals with the employee and have regular progress checks—Review how the employee is doing and where they can improve, then ask what you can do to help them improve. 

In my next Insight, I’ll give an example of a time I helped a company with their job performance evaluation process.

Job performance evaluations should motivate employees to want to improve.