The employee performance evaluation is one of the key activities in a performance management process or cycle. While ideally, employees are receiving coaching and feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis, the annual employee performance appraisal gives both the manager and employee an opportunity to synthesize feedback and present it in a concise way. The employee performance evaluation is also used to document goals for the coming year, and outline any training and development activities that could help the employee progress and prepare for professional or career goals.
Why do Employee Performance Evaluations?
Employee performance evaluations are a key way to document performance, formalize feedback, ensure some level of dialogue or communication between managers and employees, and assign goals and development activities to direct an employee's work. Without them, employees are working in the dark, and your company is likely not benefiting from their labor.
How Often Should You Conduct Employee Performance Evaluations?
That depends on your performance management process, your work culture, the nature of your business, and the tools you are using to conduct employee performance appraisals. At minimum, you should conduct employee performance evaluations at least once a year, for all employees. Many companies also see benefits from semi-annual or quarterly reviews, or from reviews at the end of a project or client engagement. Generally, the more formal feedback you give an employee the better. Formally scheduled performance evaluations help to encourage continuous feedback and dialogue between a manager and employee, but if you're using a paper-based system, you may not be able to afford to conduct performance evaluations more than once a year.
The Best Tools for Conducting Employee Performance Evaluations
Many companies are still using a paper-based process for recording their employee performance appraisals, but these systems have inherent limitations:
- They tend to be slow and costly because they involve handling large quantities of paper (mailing, copying/printing, filling out, counting, filing, etc.).
- The paper employee reviews tend to be filed away and forgotten. The valuable feedback, goals and training plans they contain are not typically used to direct current performance.
- It's almost impossible to ensure any level of consistency in performance ratings and feedback.
- There is no way to aggregate the information they contain and use it to strategically drive the business and employee performance.
Today, the best tools for conducting employee performance appraisals are web-based. This ensures that managers and employees have anytime, anywhere access to their employee performance appraisals. Tools like Halogen eAppraisal provide you with innovative features including automated email reminders, year-round performance journals, comment helper, spelling and language sensitivity checkers, and competency libraries that dramatically reduce the time it takes to write employee reviews.
As a result, many companies see a marked improvement in the quality and consistency of feedback provided. Built in goal alignment and development planning tools help ensure employees are working on the right things, and have the skills and knowledge to succeed.
As a bonus, automating your performance management process give you access to a number of reports and tools that make managing it a breeze, and you now have the ability to aggregate performance data and use it for strategic workforce planning.
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