A well-designed evaluation form can improve your employee performance management process and encourage dialogue between managers and employees. If it’s easy to use and prompts managers to consider all aspects of employee performance and development, it can be one of your key talent management tools. Recently, we wrote an employee evaluation form tips article to guide you in your efforts, and thought we’d share some of our thoughts and expertise with you.

1. Make them simple to use – so managers and employees will actually use them.
2. Keep them familiar – with terminology and concepts your people are accustomed to.
3. Gather the info you need to achieve the goals of your process – make sure you capture the data you need for any related talent management processes.
4. Create different forms for specific jobs or roles – so everyone gets information that’s relevant to them.
5. Choose the most effective rating method for competencies – your goal is to drive employee performance.
6. Encourage SMART goals – include fields to capture all the required details so they don’t get missed.
7. Address development needs – make sure employees are equipped to deal with their challenges, and continuously expanding their knowledge and skills.
8. Provide sufficient space for feedback – leave enough room to gather (and encourage) the detailed comments that employees crave.

And our number one tip…

9. Ditch the paper!

Moving to a web-based employee performance and talent management system can make your forms a lot more effective and easier to use.

If you’d like, you can check out some sample employee evaluation forms our customers have developed using Halogen eAppraisal. We have PDF and MS Word versions available for you to download.