Employee Performance Evaluation

While we have discussed the importance of educational surveys in the collegiate environment, using questionnaire research to gather feedback about a school's performance can be just as valuable as early as elementary school.

Many schools across the nation have already begun to conduct quantitative research to discover insights into everything from teacher performance to quality of cafeteria food. One method is distributing teacher evaluation forms to parents of young children to collect feedback about their child's classroom experience. Schools can ask parents their opinion of the teacher's professionalism in conference settings and if they feel their child feels comfortable in the classroom environment.

On the reverse side, schools can also use surveys as teacher employee performance evaluation forms. Using 360 degree feedback, schools can distribute electronic surveys to principals, department leaders, coworkers, parents and students to evaluate how well a teacher is doing in the classroom. Conducting this type of research has become especially important before awarding a teacher tenure.

Surveying can have a big impact on your school, your staff and your students.

People responsible for performance appraisals often assign a low priority to them because they have not thought about the benefits of a good work performance evaluation session. Following are some advantages of doing a thoughtful appraisal on a timely basis. Check those point that are important to you.

Among human resources professionals, it is generally agreed supervisors everywhere need to do a much better job of evaluating their employees. It has to begin by identifying the trouble with the way many job reviews are handled today. So what is wrong with performance evaluations? The most common complaints include:


 What's important is the employee's average performance over time. Successful careers aren't made out of isolated, singular events. They're built on taking care of business every day!

Not many of us enjoy our annual job performance reviews. Unfortunately, the time of year is upon most of us when we sit down with supervisors and review our work from the past year. There are some things managers can do to make employment review forms more energizing for both your employees and yourself:

1. Reframe how you and your employees view employee performance evaluations. Think of performance reviews as a time to reinvigorate your employees. View them as an investment, not a chore. Create your employee evaluation form templates with this idea in mind.

2. Focus on strengths, but don’t ignore weaknesses. A manager’s role is to help employees improve workplace performance and continue to grow and develop in their jobs. But it’s also a supervisor's role to recognize what employees are good at and how they can use their strengths even more. When creating job performance review forms, put the employees strength areas first, then put the areas that need improvement after. Start off on a positive note.

3. Set challenging and specific goals that are both short and long term. When we set difficult goals our maximum effort kicks in. "Challenging goals facilitate pride in accomplishment," says goals researcher Gary Latham. Studies have shown that setting challenging goals explains why some people perform better than others. Everyone likes a reason to get up in the morning and go to work to tackle that really exciting project!

Just like educators, supervisors have more influence than perhaps they realize over how well their employees perform. Turn this year’s performance reviews into an energy-producing experience. Apply some of these techniques when creating your own performance reviews.

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.

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.

In today's economy, there are a lot of people looking for jobs. Some of those candidates are the cream of the crop, but how do you weed out the unqualified applicants from the qualified? It can be a real struggle for the HR department to identify the best candidates. It's no secret that asking pre-interview questions or providing job applicants with a pre-interview questionnaire can save you from having to speak with people who are not a fit from the start. Using an online survey tool can help facilitate your search. Cvent's Web Survey software gives human resource departments the ability to create online surveys and questionnaires for job candidate screenings. By applying survey scoring to responses, HR execs can spend more time looking at qualified applicants and less time with the duds.


You can set up as many questions as you want, setting scores for each question. Integrating trigger emails with the survey, hiring mangers can receive emails when an applicant receives a score equal to or greater than a specified score. But don't forget there may be more to some of these stories, be sure to include some open ended questions in your HR survey to gain more insights to the applicant's history.

An added benefit to conducting online pre-interview job questionnaires is having more information to help guide the interview. The interviewer can bring in examples from responses to ask for more clarification and explanation, as well as identify other qualities (like how well the candidate puts words to paper) which you can't get from an interview.

Survey scoring is an excellent feature in any HR survey software. This is one example of how survey scoring can save you time as an HR exec. Do you use online survey scoring in employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys?

When was the last time you surveyed employees to understand job satisfaction?  Staff opinion surveys can tell you a lot about the organization’s culture and overall employee satisfaction.  With organizations asking employees to do more with less time and resources, keeping the workplace positive and productive should be a top goal.  Every day, I read about job burnout and added stress at work, both these factors can increase the cost of doing business.  In this economy, most organizations are trying to cut costs, not increase them.  We recommend using employee questionnaires to identify possible areas to cut costs, reallocate resources or boost productivity.  You may find adding a break room would give employees space to relax for a few minutes and boost productivity when they return to their desks.  Most employees are happy to share their cost cutting ideas and program ideas with employers.  You may find that the best cost cutting ideas come from the trenches and not senior management. 

If you’re thinking about surveying employees, whether it’s to conduct employee performance evaluations or job satisfaction surveys, Cvent’s Web Survey software can help get your survey program started.  Cvent’s online survey tool has templates and question libraries, such as sample employee survey questions, to help get your HR surveys off the ground in minutes. To learn more about using Cvent's Web Survey software for your survey management needs, sign up for a product demonstration.