Giving an Effective Review

Learn how to give your employees an effective performance evaluation.

Tutorial

Learning how to give an effective performance evaluation is an art not mastered by a lot of managers. If your HR department does not have a defined performance evaluation process, or you want to evaluate your employees more than once a year, mastering this process will make you a great manager and help your employees deliver better results.

Feedback is a two-way street

The first step in an employee evaluation process is to gather feedback from the employee on how they think they are doing. This can be a simple 1-5 rating process on such areas as teamwork, leadership, problem solving, management, and others. You should gather comments for each section as well. As a manager, I would always prepare my performance evaluations at the same time my employees were preparing theirs. 90% of the time, my ratings would match or be very close to the employee's own ratings. I consistently would get one employee who would rate himself lower than he really was, and one employee who would rate himself higher. If an employee is honest, their review often will match your opinion of them.

Provide Detailed Feedback

One of the key elements to providing a great performance review is to provide a lot of feedback. You cannot expect your employees to improve themselves if you do not provide enough written feedback for them. You will need to invest a considerable amount of time to really provide a good performance review for your employees. I typically spend about 5 hours writing each employee evalutation.

Followup

If your company only provides yearly evaluation, it can help to followup every 6 months with your employees to ensure their goals are being met and they are improving on the areas you identified on their previous review.