Employee Evaluation

If you’re a manager, you need to give your employees feedback. Feedback to your employees allows you to improve your team and your manager-employee relationship.

No matter what position an employee holds, it’s important to offer feedback. However, managers should not feel the need to wait until the annual review to offer feedback. By giving feedback throughout the employment period, the manager-employee relationship becomes engaging rather than distant.

If you are offering feedback to your employees on a regular basis, you may not feel the need to conduct an employee performance review. The annual review is a great time to look over accomplishments of the previous year and set visions and goals for the upcoming year or quarter–depending on how often you conduct performance reviews.

Regular feedback is great for the short-term, it clues an employee into how they are doing and where they can improve their performance. A regular review using a checklist or template is a great way to set long-term goals. By showing the employee what the future holds for them and the team, it offers a shared vision for everyone to strive toward. An employee performance evaluation, when conducted properly, ensures that your team can continue to move forward together in the quest for success.

Employee Evaluation Comments

When conducting an employee review, it’s important to remember to keep things positive. Yes, even if they did not meet expectations. By keeping the environment positive, honest, and open, you can continue to build the employee-manager relationship where they can be honest and open as well.

One way to do this is to use positive employee evaluation comments. By altering unsatisfactory statements to instead reflect room for improvement, employees are more likely to strive to reach those goals instead of feeling dejected or disappointed. For example, instead of saying that an employee’s performance is not up to par, say that you believe they can do better than what was previously accomplished.

If compelled, check out a few performance review comments examples to help give a positive feeling to any kind of feedback. It’s a great way to find the best way to convey common messages in a positive tone. Sometimes, the impact of how we say things outweighs what we say. Every girlfriend I’ve ever had can tell you more about that if you’re curious.

Some employee evaluation sample comments you will find can only be read in a robotic voice. Disregard those. You want to find comments you can actually hear yourself saying. Practice in front of the mirror, not for hours, but just a few times. Pretend you were on the other end of the conversation, listen for an echo, and judge the authenticity of your own comment. If it sounds ridiculous, don’t say it. If it’s actually how you feel and sounds like a person would say it rather than Microsoft Sam, roll with it.

Proper employee evaluation comments can leave an employee leaving the review inspired rather than upset or resentful. You want to grow your employees, not impede them.

Employee Evaluation Phrases

Employee evaluation phrases are important to plan out even before your employee review. If you are new to the evaluation scene, write down phrases you want to use. Similar to the comments, spend some time in the mirror practicing them. Don’t spend so much time in the mirror that you notice that zit that’s starting to come in. Stop worrying about the zit. Focus on the performance review.

Using employee performance evaluation phrases to keep things positive will leave employees thanking you for the feedback rather than constructing office supply voodoo dolls after your review.

Some phrases to use for unsatisfactory performance to replace the ancient ones are:

I’d like you to speak up more in meetings.
I trust you to find tasks on your own between assignments.
Try to sit back and let others share their opinions.
I’d like you to cultivate a more positive attitude.
Problem solving doesn’t have to happen overnight.

If you like those, we know a place where you can find even more performance review phrases.

To reiterate, find phrases that fit your company culture and your own personality. Maybe you can’t see yourself saying any of those things, but they’ll offer a great start to where you want to be as a manager. Let us know what phrases you’ve found most effective for your team.

Employee Self Evaluation

Even before you conduct an evaluation of your employees, let them conduct an employee self-evaluation. It will likely make your job easier and it will give them time to reflect on their performance. Also, you will be able to see how well an employee is understanding their role on your team. If an employee is confused about their role, it will be easy to clarify, so everyone can get back on the right track.

An employee may think he can improve in an area that you might not have even considered. Alternatively, they may think they can improve in an area where you thought they were excelling. A self-evaluation lets you see what priorities the employee has and gives you a better insight into his personality.

Employee Self Evaluation Sample

Although leaving employees on their own for a performance review could be interesting to see what they came up with, consider giving your team an employee self-evaluation example. After evaluating a few employee self-evaluation examples, you’ll find one you like.

Your employees should be able to dig deeper internally into issues you deem important regarding their professional role. Get them to evaluate themselves on their own potential because they may have better insight.

Employee Self Evaluation Form

By using an employee self-evaluation form, your employees can evaluate themselves before you reach the personal evaluation phase. Along with self-evaluation, a form is also a great way to look back on what they were looking to improve upon in the future. A manager, as well as an employee, can look back on how far they’ve come if forms are well documented and archived.

A proper employee self-evaluation form template will have a date as well as how long the employee has been with the company. Once your team continues to grow, you can then see what employees might struggle with at certain times. If your employees are continuously advancing and someone fills your past role, you may be able to realize what you struggled with at a similar time and help them through the process.

Employee self-evaluation form templates aren’t just for the present, managers and employees alike can look back and praise how far they’ve come. It might come in handy when office morale is a little lower than usual.

Employee Evaluation Questions

When you set up your employee evaluation, you will likely have some questions to ask or questions in your template. For the employee self-evaluation, offer them some employee self-evaluation questions to ask themselves while evaluating different criteria. Expecting your employees to understand what you mean when there is a “communication” box and a scale of 1-4 is not sufficient for self-evaluation, especially the first time.

List a few questions or a description of what each category means to you. Decide if you are looking to evaluate internal or external communication.

Offering questions to your team will improve the collective evaluation process. You can then go through their employee self-evaluation answers rather than both sides going into the meeting blind. Having topics, questions, and thought-out answers will allow for a better evaluation than putting your employees on the hot-seat.

You may think that you would prefer an on-the-spot response to your employees thinking out answers. Consider instead that responses can address strengths and weaknesses in each category rather than just an initial response.

If you would like to discuss some topics with spur of the moment responses, keep those questions to yourself until the review process.

Self-Evaluation Phrases

When your employees have time to prepare, they will use better employee self-evaluation phrases and more insightful comments than the norm. Your employees can address exactly what they think they are doing well and areas to improve upon.

By giving time to your employees to evaluate themselves, they can come up with helpful employee self-evaluation comments. Comments should include constructive feedback that they can give you about their own performance. If your employees don’t know exactly how they’re doing before your meeting, it will be less meaningful and simply informative. Provide them with metrics and give them their own and ask how they can improve upon them.

They’ll likely come up with examples that are easy for you to accommodate and more effective for them.

Employee Evaluation Form

Throughout the evaluation process, a great asset to have is an employee evaluation form template. It can be common to reject the idea of an employee evaluation form as too impersonal. Instead, think of a template as a checklist of things you want to cover.

Approaching evaluation as simply a necessity will not result in the most effective review for either side. Your employees want and need feedback to do their jobs effectively. You may be missing out on valuable potential without employee evaluations.

Think of the employee evaluation as a time to re-energize your team members as well as get back on the same page. After a while, it’s easy to get lost in multitasking and documentation on their way to their exact role. They could be prioritizing tasks differently than you and an employee evaluation can be a great way to leave them inspired and driving toward the collective success of the business.

Employee Evaluation Examples

As a new manager, consider researching a few performance evaluation examples. Although you may not find one exactly relating to how you wish to evaluate your team, it will give you a good idea of what other people deem important.

Also, you should feel confident to combine or edit other evaluation examples. No one knows your company and team like you do, so if something seems off to you, change it.

Consider pulling a veteran manager or even another new manager aside to role-play a performance evaluation. The other side can play devil’s advocate and be defensive in different review phases. You need to be confident and know how to address pushbacks. Don’t worry, you’ll get to play the instigator as well.

You likely won’t have any of these problems in your performance reviews, if you do, differences open up insightful conversations. When you role-play like things will be much worse, you will be pleasantly surprised how well your performance reviews go.

By looking and role-playing your own employee performance evaluation samples, you can help out other managers as well as yourself. Practice makes perfect for both parties and by working through different scenarios for different employees, you will be able to handle any situation thrown at you through your multiple evaluation meetings.

Employee Evaluation Template

Similar to employee evaluation forms, an employee evaluation will give you a good idea of how to judge your employees. If you set a standard for your company, you will be able to remain consistent across teams and employees. Rather than evaluating each employee in their own role, you will be able to standardize evaluation.

If an employee thinks they are doing well but are below the average in any metric, you can then mention that you would like to see them strive to be above it next quarter. Instead of just simply stating, “Yeah, I think you’re doing well,” you can have data to state exactly that or otherwise.

By using an employee evaluation template, you can then compare evaluations of employees later on in the month and see how they may have improved or where you can continue to help inspire them to improve.

Start instituting these tips into your team’s performance reviews and well as your coworkers. Offer these tips to improve other teams around the office and you will earn your spot atop the performance review office experts.