Employee Evaluations

Creating an evaluative tool to measure an employee's performance can be a daunting task for even the most experienced managers.

Here are some survey design tips to help you create effective performance evaluation materials that will be meaningful for both supervisors and supervisees:

1) Use titles that are less challenging for employees (e.g. calling the instrument an "evaluation" as opposed to a "test")

2) Have a place at the beginning of the job performance evaluation form to clearly delineate the employee being evaluated, such as their name, title, department, and other pertinent job related individual information, like hiring date and date of last review. Other non-job related demographics (such as employee age or eye color) should be left out.

3) Make sure the content the employee is being evaluated on always refers directly back to their position. This can include technical job-related skills, and "softer" characteristics such as courtesy to both clients and co-workers, or punctuality.

4) Employee evaluations lend themselves nicely to the use of Likert scales, but a good evaluation uses verbal measurements as opposed to numeric. For example one end of the survey rating scale would be "Needs Improvement" and the opposite end of the scale "Excellent Performance."

5) Leave plenty of room for written employee performance evaluation comments after each content area. Both the manager AND the employee should write down their thoughts about the content area discussed. This makes both parties feel like they are contributing equally to a conversation, rather than one person telling the other how to act.

6) Include space for concrete development plans and steps to be accomplished, including dates and time lines for the progress to take place. It's also a good idea to include mid-term progress review dates so manager and employee can check in with each other. This ensures both parties are still on target for a successful future review.

7) Allow both the employee and manager to sign the list of employee evaluation questions and responses after reading all parts thoroughly and together. Leave time for discussion of the evaluation. 
 
8) If your company has an HR department, have an appropriate HR supervisor review your staff evaluation form to double-check that all the right notes are hit.

I probably don't need to explain why creating employee surveys should be part of every HR department, but coming up with the correct employee evaluation template or employee job satisfaction survey questions isn't as as obvious as know you should do them. I recently came across a few sample workplace survey questions I thought may help when you start writing employee questionnaires:

One thing you should notice in the example employee satisfaction questions are they are different survey question types. A general online survey best practice to remember when crafting employee survey questions is to vary the question type. It helps keep the respondent engaged and lowers survey abandonment rate.

Here at Cvent, we get asked for survey templates all the time. That's why we've created a bank of survey questions and pre-created questionnaires for all clients to utilize within their account. But it never seems to be enough. Sample employee motivation surveys, employee evaluation survey examples, sample employee questionnaire, employee satisfaction survey templates, the list goes on, and on, and on...

While this post may not give you all the answers or the complete employee survey template you're looking for, it definitely is a start. Below are some sample survey questions for employee questionnaires.


While not all of these questions are necessary (or appropriate) in any given employee engagement survey or job satisfaction questionnaire, you should see how some of them will fit into your next employee satisfaction survey template.

Every organization should ask themselves What is good customer service? and create their own definition for good customer service based on the answer they come up with. Giving customers the opportunity to provide feedback on their customer experience is one way to improve customer service quality, but only if the customer feedback gets back to the employees. Lots of organizations use customer service surveys to measure customer experiences and customer loyalty. What separates the organizations with mediocre customer service from the organizations with excellent customer service is sharing the feedback from the customer loyalty surveys with the employees. Seems pretty straight forward, right?

I suggest you take it a step further, however. While sharing the aggregate results of customer feedback surveys with front-line employees is important, you can use these customer surveys as assessments of employee performance or staff evaluations. If you're not already using customer surveys to support this type of employee performance feedback, here are some steps from the CRMBuyer to make this type of process possible:

• Move from random survey sampling to an attempted census. Random survey samples are great when you're just trying to get an overall sense of customer satisfaction rates. However, if you're trying to collect feedback to figure out how to improve employee performance, a random sample is unlikely to provide enough data for each employee. Like with all other types of surveys, not everyone you send personalized survey invitations to will participate, but you will likely get enough responses to support the employee assessments.

• Develop new employee reports. To improve workforce performance, organizations can't continue to provide infrequent high-level survey reports. Instead, employees should get to see weekly reports. Using standardized reports that compare the employee to the overall average and to their colleagues as a group have the most impact.

• Develop new management reports. Like with how employees see the customer feedback reports needs to change with this strategy, management reports do too. Managers should be able to see responses by employees so they can take appropriate action. Managers will have different opinions on how much information should be shared with their staff; some will want to share every customer comment from the employee performance evaluation form, others wont want to share individual survey results.

• Develop HR guidelines for the use of these employee reports. The HR department should be deeply involved in the creation of these HR employee appraisal forms and employee survey reports. If an employee constantly receives negative customer feedback, the organization may choose to terminate their employment so it helps to keep HR in the loop. However, that shouldn't be the goal of this type of customer survey program. The survey feedback should be used to improve employee job performance and mentor them. With the help of customer service assessment surveys and employee performance review forms organizations can figure out how to improve customer service quality.

When creating online surveys, survey writers have the option to select whether the survey should collect respondent information or will be an anonymous survey. This is an extremely helpful feature if you conduct surveys, which at times, require absolute anonymity.

Collect Respondent Contact Information Survey: If during the survey creation wizard a survey designer selects this option, all survey respondents will be required to enter their contact information, such as name, email address, phone number etc. Setting up which contact fields you need collected for your survey takes place when you're designing your survey.

If you need a contact field that doesn't come standard in the survey application, simply create a custom contact field. We typically see custom contact fields created for pieces of information such as employee ID, account name, membership number, etc.

In a survey with identified survey respondents, all respondents must verify their name and email before starting the electronic survey online. This ensures their responses are correctly matched to their contact record in your address book. If the contact is not in your address book their information will be added automatically. An additional plus for the Cvent Contact Database is that even if they do exist in your address book, if they update their information while completing a survey, it will be automatically updated for you.

Anonymous Survey: In an anonymous survey, respondents can begin the web survey without entering their name or email address. No contact information will be added to or updated in your address book - because it's not being collected. As you would expect, the identities of your survey sample are kept anonymous and no survey responses are matched to contacts.

How do you know which type of survey is correct for your survey research project? Here's a few tips:

Wondering whether you should start using an employee evaluation tool or how to do employee evaluations regularly instead of those yearly paper evaluations? Sometimes employee evaluations feel like a chore and extra paper work, managers and human resources professionals don't realize the potential benefit. Regularly conducting employee performance reviews offer a range of benefits:

Even still, employee evaluations cause some extra stress for both employees and employers. Remember Office Space? The employees loved being evaluated by the Bobs.


Office Space I have people skills - Watch more Funny Videos
While it may seem on the surface there's a lot of work that goes into conducting staff evaluations or conducting 360 degree feedback surveys, selecting an online employee evaluation tool or 360 survey software can eliminate a lot of the paper work for the HR department. After creating the evaluation once in your online survey tool (just like you have to do for yearly paper evaluation then make copies) you can collect all the same information without any of the data entry or printing expenses. You can even improve the experience for the managers completing the evaluation form by using various forms of survey question logic to ask important follow up questions, or hide irrelevant questions.

A good employee performance review example of how survey tools can improve the experience so managers dread it less is if your organization has different variations of the same survey for different departments or business units. Instead of having to manage and update several documents because you need to change one question in the list of employee evaluation questions that are shared across all evaluation forms, you can do it in one place. With one survey evaluation, you can use skip, branch and advanced conditional logic to show the variations only when appropriate.

The same idea can be applied to 360 degree feedback surveys. The 360 degree feedback example might change slightly depending on the role of the person filling it out. A manager may see a different set of questions than a co-worker. Again instead of having to manage these variations of the feedback form, you can keep it all in one survey online.

If surveying is part of your job (HR surveys, marketing surveys, customer feedback surveys, etc.), one of the best things you can do before you creating a survey - especially if you've never done a survey project before - is to learn from others. I always take surveys when I'm asked. I'll admit my draw to taking them is because I'm curious about what they're going to ask, but I also want to see what things they're doing right and what things I should avoid.

Looking at other people's surveys are a great way to get ideas for good survey questions. If you're focus is on customer satisfaction or customer service feedback, it should be easy to put your hands on other organizations' business surveys. After all, we're all someone's customer. This is the same with marketing questionnaires or product surveys. Every once in awhile, you should fall into someone's sample. However, if you're trying to get sample survey questions for an employee evaluation feedback form, staff opinion survey or other HR survey, the internet might be your best friend.

While it's easy to get question ideas from questionnaires in the same category as the one you're working on, don't discount what you can learn from surveys in other categories. Best practices cross over categories and someone creating a customer service survey can learn a lot from an education survey.

If you're interested in learning more about survey best practices, sign up for Cvent's free webinar.

How green are your employee survey practices? In celebration of Earth Day, I wanted to spend some time talking about how Human Resources executives could green up their HR surveys. It's really popular to be seen as a "Green Organization" these days, but some people have the misconception that being green means you're spending more. This isn't necessarily true. We consume six times more paper today than 50 years ago, with the average office worker using 20 reams of paper annually (that's 10,000 sheets!). Just cutting paper consumption can save organizations money.

But how does this relate to greening up your employee surveys?

If you conduct employee evaluation surveys, job satisfaction surveys, staff opinion surveys, or any other type of HR survey, you have the opportunity to cut your organization's paper consumption just by moving your survey project online. Web based HR survey software can eliminate the need for paper surveys. Furthermore, you can gather more of the information you need. Anonymous employee online questionnaires could yield response rates as high as 80 or 90 percent.

Taking your employee surveys to the web have more benefits than just cutting the human resource department's paper consumption. Check out our past blog posts for some additional benefits to using HR survey software to send web based surveys to staff.

Using online surveys to gather business intelligence may not be always be an automatic instinct for your organization. However, customer survey questionnaires are in fact a great way to evaluate your competition and gather insights about the business value propositions your clients rate high.

If you employ surveys to prospects and leads who leave the sales funnel, you can discover even more valuable information about why prospects chose another product or service. Were their features better? Did they they prefer the competition's follow up during the sales process?

When creating a questionnaire for competitive research, it's important to set goals. As with all surveys, whether it's a business survey, customer service questionnaire, employee evaluation or course evaluation survey, you should always "begin at the end." Define what the organization wants to get out of the project. Setting a goal before beginning the questionnaire design will better guide you through the survey creation process.

If you run web surveys and use email marketing to solicit responses, you may encounter deliverability issues. The common myth surrounding "Undeliverable" is that ISPs and organizations block messaging at the server level. We're not suggesting ISPs and organizations aren’t the cause for some of your undeliverables, but they can’t shoulder all the blame.

There are some things marketers should be doing to boost deliverability, especially when your customer research, training evaluation or employee satisfaction surveys rely on it. Here are a couple quick tips to improve email deliverability:

• Clean your lists. Following best practices to increase open rates and survey responses through email marketing doesn't matter if you ignore bounce backs. Using a web based survey company such as Cvent helps keep contact lists clean by automatically cleansing your database. It marks undeliverables so that those contacts never receive another email. Beyond that, you should have a monitored email address for bounce backs.

• Monitor results in real time. As a best practice, we suggest testing any survey before launching it to your entire list. This should include message testing to a segment of the list you plan to use. If you have the wrong messaging go out to your contacts, you're going to be hurt by spam complaints. Monitoring results in real time helps you identify and fix small problems before they ruin the integrity of your entire set of contacts.