Best Way to Evaluate Your Employee Performance: A Complete HR Guide

Are you wondering how to evaluate employee performance in uncertain situations like the COVID-19 pandemic or afterwards?

The business world has evolved a lot over the last 3 years. Due to the Global Pandemic employers, leaders, and all the front-line management people are facing several challenges to keep their employees motivated.

According to SHRM COVID-19 research, 2 in 3 employers say maintaining employee morale has been a challenge.

Since they’ve taken many proactive management techniques to inspire success and overcome challenges. It’s time to modify the parameter of employee evaluation as well.

Companies conduct employee evaluations in terms of comparing people’s work performance with expectations. The format of the report ideally depends on company policies.

Usually, it includes a review of employees’ different tasks, workplace behaviour along with improvement suggestions. It establishes a direct communication path between management and employees. So, employees can easily understand the company’s expectations from them.

For the post-COVID-19 world, you must update your evaluation process and guide your employees to improve their performance.

Today we’ve shared 10 essential attributes to evaluate an employee effectively. Learn the purpose of employee evaluation and how it’ll enhance employee performance after such a stressful time.

What’s the Main Objective of Employee Evaluation

American companies are losing $1,685 per employee due to loss of productivity and absenteeism.

Stress.org

Employees are the core assets of any organization. To make them real gems you need to guide them on right track. Monitoring their works, giving feedback, arranging necessary resources all are included in this process. Employee evaluation is the way to review your employees work and tell them-

• How they are performing
• Are they walking in the right path
• How they can improve
• What should they modify in their works

A strategical employee evaluation system may help you and your employees back to a productive life. In most of the cases, employers use employee evaluations to-

• Review a worker’s job performance
• Remind workers what company expects from them
• Drive employees to achieve company goal
• Advice people for their further improvements
• Identify the areas of expertise & weakness
• make important decisionslike increaments, promotions, and layoffs

After passing a stressful time, it would be challenging for leaders and managers to lead their employees accordingly. According to a survey of mental health provider Ginger – 69% of employees claimed that the coronavirus is the most stressful time of their career, and 88% said they had experienced moderate to extreme stress over the past four to six weeks.

Considering these facts, you also have to bring changes to your employee evaluation process.

Read this article to learn 8 Effective Ways To Support Your Employee Mental Health.

10 Key Factors For Evaluating an Employee’s Performance

It can be tricky when you have several departments in your company and your team members need to perform a variety of tasks. Below are the most important factors you need to appraise during evaluating employee performance.

1. Process of Execution

A plan is not accountable until it goes for execution. Similarly, the qualification of an employee depends on how smoothly he carries his duty. Observe closely the ways your employees manage time, perform duties, and achieve the goal. Whether they are self-sufficient or need extra assistance in their tasks.

Check the deliverables so you can know if they do “high-level” work. Every step from start to finish of a task matters to identify an employee’s capability.

2. Quality of Work

Quantity sometimes can be considered if its quality is higher. Monitor the work quality an employee does over the evaluation period. Moreover, examine every detail including how perfect it is, how much error it has, what kind of extra effort you need to correct it.

You can collect feedback from other team members or clients. So, you can decide if the employee’s work touches the standard of your company.

3. Level of Innovation

Every company wants its employees to be more creative and innovative when solving problems. Look at your employees’ function of knowledge, curiosity, imagination, and capability to break the monotony. It’s important to notice if they are willing to explore new things and bring changes on their own responsibility.

In order to identify their level of creativity, you can observe how many times they come up with new solutions and are ready to take risks for better results.

4. Degree of Adaptability

After joining a new company an employee needs to adapt to changing environments and work processes. Moreover, changes can come anytime all over the path. For example, COVID-19 evolves the concept of the workplace over the night.

So you need to consider- Are your employees willing to learn new things? Are they able to accept changes positively? How much they are capable to update their working process to fit transitions in the workplace? Find out how the employees take on new challenges and make adjustments to reach their pre-defined goals.

5. Amount of Continuous Improvement

This world is changing every day with the rapid advancement of technology. Also, the growth of a specific industry has different levels of impact on your business. Moreover, employees must keep themselves up-to-date with the current world and be concerned about the upcoming changes.

However, everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow each day, month, quarter, and year. Look at the desire and levels of effort to improve in your employees.

6. Power of Planning and Organization

Do the employees complete the tasks in time? Do they follow the framework you’ve set for them? Also, define how perfectly they follow the rules and meet the goals. They need to maintain a hierarchy and prioritize the tasks so it doesn’t hamper the workflow.

If team members have a focused mind and solid guidelines to perform they can easily bring the expected results. So, this capability is surely an important factor to evaluate your employees.

7. Level of Potentiality

Each job needs particular expertise to play the role. Employers also hire a person based on his/her potentiality to do some specific tasks. Employees must have the ability to take responsibilities related to their position. Also, under an organization, several people work in multiple departments.

In order to carry out a concrete goal each and, every people must do his part accurately. Identify your employees’ quality in defined criteria and how much effort s/he intends to give for improvements.

8. Ability to Take Ownership

Taking ownership at work makes employees more aware of their roles. Look closely are your employees willing to maximize their contributions to your company. It could be a crucial metric to measure their loyalty as well as performance.

How proactive they are in their job role? Are they focusing on achieving larger company goals? These queries help you understand if they are ready to lead future leadership or not.

9. Balance Between Productivity & Efficiency

Complete work within a pre-defined time period is important. But doing the work accurately with fine quality is also vital. These two attributes are equally important to evaluate an employee’s performance.

Say one employee completes all the work before the deadline and on the other hand, another employee misses the deadline on regular occasions. Both of the cases are not good for your organization in long run. So, measure the quality and quantity of work to analyze an employee’s performance.

10. Way to Response Feedback

Do your employees have the mindset to accept negative reviews? What actions do they take based on your feedback? Is there any drop in your employee’s performance after getting praise from you?

Constructive feedback helps your team members respond to constructive feedback respectfully and taking actions accordingly should be accounted for.

How to Evaluate an Employee Performance: The Ultimate Guide

In the evaluation process, managers usually write and present employees’ contributions, lackings, scopes, etc. It goes through some steps. These steps are not fixed, they may differ from industry to industry as well as job positions.

1. Define Performance Standards

Every employee has particular duties to perform according to his/her position. It’s important to set the responsibility of a position before hiring anyone. Also, define a standard process to perform all the tasks. So, you can easily compare an employee’s performance with predetermined standards during evaluation.

It’s better to provide your new employees with the performance standards in the first month of employment. It’ll ensure that both employers and employees remain on the same page regarding job expectations. Standards should be the same for equal position holders.

Key Takeaways-

• Set achievable task goal with ideal parameter
• Standars should match the job description
• Define clearly how the tasks should be done

2. Set Particular Goals

After setting the work standard, assign a specific goal for each employee. Goals can be similar for multiple team members. Considering their strength and weakness a manager should set measurable, attainable, and role-oriented goals. Later, you can evaluate employee performance using these goals. Also, it helps you measure their efforts throughout their time at your organization.

Also, you can suggest any upskilling course for your employees to improve themselves and reach the goal. It can be short or long-term and any rewards to meet the goal should be scaled to their impact.

Key Takeaways-

• Goals should be relatable to job position
• Set employee goals for continuous improvement
• Align individual goal to business objectives.

3. Share Constructive Feedback

There is always a scope for improvement. Track your employees’ performance throughout the year and tell them about their opportunities. Without feedback, it’s difficult for an employee to know whether he’s doing great work or giving less than his best effort.

You can mentor your people and boost employee engagement with effective reviews. This review process should happen on a regular basis. Do praise your employees when the achievement is still fresh. Timeliness is important for negative feedback as well.

Key Takeaways-

• Employee feedback should be specific & solutions oriented
• Don’t wait for a quarterly/yearly review
• Don’t criticize or share negative feedback publicly

4. Prepare Yourself for Evaluation Meeting

An evaluation report is essential to contribute value to sustainable development. You have some preparations as well to tell your employees about their efforts, errors, and advice for future advancement. before the meeting go through the reports and documents again and take notes about individuals.

Your words should be personalized for each employee. So, they can work on specific points next time. Try to encourage them with positive feedback along with useful suggestions.

Key Takeaways-

• Make a checklist to measure all the attributes
• Highlight individual’s accomplishments
• Come with personalized advice to each employee

5. Avoid Workplace Comparison

Instead of comparing your employees with each other, drive them to do better. Every employee has his/her own potential to perform a specific job. You need every player to accomplish organizational objectives collectively.

The main objective of an evaluation report is to guide your employees to the right path. Don’t compare the performance report of one employee to another. Rather encourage your employees to keep it private. Irrelative comparison creates resentment between coworkers.

Key Takeaways-

• Measured performance based on individual metrics
• Advice people solely focusing on their own problems
• Instruct people towards their vision

6. Conduct Two-way Conversation

Performance evaluation should not be a one-way conversation, it must be more engaging. Managers and employees should equally participate in the conversation. Don’t limit the discussion only to performance.

You can talk about their career growth, challenges, recognition, steps for senior leadership, and others. It’ll make your employees more loyal to your organization. Instead of repeating past mistakes, your performance conversations should focus on how they can shape their future.

Key Takeaways-

• Transparent and collaborative
• Review recent performance and instract to impact, development, & growth
• Conclude with next steps and follow-up

Depending on your business purpose, individual job roles evaluation processes could be different. But these are the basic steps you need to follow in every employee evaluation.

Ideal Employee Performance Evaluation Format

Below there is a format of evaluation report especially designed for “Digital Marketers”. The organization divided 100 marks here into different criteria and set a maximum mark for each.

The team leader and HR department collaboratively evaluate an employee giving marks in each criterion. And the employee gets a badge based on the achieved marks.

Below you find a comment section. It includes some suggestions for further improvements.

Olivia Lucas
Content Marketer

Quarter 1: 2023 Assessment Criteria

Performance Curve	Learning Curve	Personality Curve
60	20	20

Performance Badge	Description	Achieved Points
Rockstar	Keep Your Good Work Up!	XX

Performance Curve

Manage Deadline	Productivity (Tasks & Goals Reached)	Quality of Work	Reporting Skills	Extra Responsibility
10	25	15	5	5

Learning Curve

Explore new Things Beyond Regular Work	Soft & Technical Skill Development	Product & Domain Knowledge	Knowledge Sharing
3	5	8	4

Personality Curve

Stand Up	Behaviour	Cultural Fit	Helping nature	Community
3	5	8	4	2

Comments:

• Do focus on advanced Keyword Research
• Continue doing research on Evergreen content and its impact
• Read some fiction books on regular basis
• Join more advanced SEO cources
• Study on outreach & B2B communications

Lift-up Your Evaluation Report Utilizing an Automated Project Management Tool

WP Project manager is a prominent WordPress plugin that comes with various useful features. It enables you to manage projects & teams right from your dashboard. This simple but expert automation tool helps you manage your team collaboration and deliver the task timely. Along with other modern project management features, it provides you with complete reports of projects, team members’ activities, and others focusing on various criteria.

Employees of your organization can include all their tasks here. Managers get the option to assign tasks with deadlines to any specific team member. In turn, it’ll be easy to track their progress and provide essential resources in time.

Besides, this plugin allows you to create different types of reports such as overdue tasks, complete tasks, project tasks, summary reports, etc. It is also possible to create reports for specific user activities. All you need to do is select the user name and time frame.

During evaluation time you can use these reports to measure employee performance and their improvement over a time period. It minimizes a large portion of your calculation and eliminates the possibility of error.

☞ Check our official documentation on WP Project Manager reports.

Update Your Company Strategy and Evaluate Employee Performance in the Right Way

Survived tough times, people are now getting habituated with the new lifestyle. Employers also put their best efforts to establish an appropriate workplace minimizing the risks of community spread of the COVID-19. Whereas many companies decided permanently to shift remort work, others have opened their premises for the employee. For both cases, you must have the right approach to boost your employee productivity.

Although it’s not an easy task. But integrating updated managerial skills into your own leadership practices, you can break the monotony. Even a simple check-in conversation can make a big impact. Whether it can change the situation or not your team members will feel confident hearing from you.

With proper evaluation, employees get a clear picture of their current position and where they need to reach. Under the pressure of expectations, daily tasks, and targets people often get distracted. They need timely guidelines and constructive feedback to stay on track.

Talking about providing proper direction and assessing employee performance, there are complete HR management solutions like WP ERP HR, which makes this job convenient and ever so effortless for the HR manager. A comprehensive employee management tool such as this not only helps in employee development strategy but also enable companies to evaluate performance to a great extent.

Do you have any further queries on how to evaluate employee performance? Or do you want to add any other effective tips or evaluation steps in our proposed guide? Do use the comment section below to share your views.