EvaluationWhether or not they’re called evaluation forms, employee reviews, mission reviews, company evaluations or some other fancy name, for now, you should know that they enable you and your company’s execs know what’s what, help you keep in touch with your employees.

If  properly implemented, the evaluation process, through the evaluation form as the tool, should establish an easy way to communicate, give and receive feedback, thus enabling your business to keep on running smoothly.

Note: Usualy, a good eval form has three (3) chapters:

  1. The 1st is a self-evaluation form. It reflects how your employees see themselves, their work and their interpersonal activity – hard skills and soft skills. It also notes if the previously set goals have been achieved and sets goals for the immediate future.
  2. The 2nd should reflect your employees’ view of your company’s objectives – the brand, its values, your mission and your vision.
  3. The 3rd contains a mirror evaluation of the first chapter and it is usually filled-in by the employee’s direct manager or, in flat organizational schemes, by a peer in the same team.

Together, the first and third chapters act like a reality check for both management and the employee. For optimal quality of the feedback, the 1st and 3rd chapters should be filled in separately, without the employee, the peer or the manager first seeing what the other one wrote.

The 2nd part conveys your employees’ sense of direction and it is primarily an evaluation of your inner brand, your management and your leadership.

Always view your company’s evaluation results both as individual answers and as aggregated data. Individually, they give you the chance to identify personal grievances, or sore spots that need tending to. In aggregated form they show you the big picture and emphasize the areas of your business processes that need some tuning.

Famous last words on the matter:

  • don’t take the evaluation process to seriously… make it light, make it a game, make it a story… An uptight attitude towards the process might make your employees not want to share their true views, or not even want to participate at all. That’s because you give them the false impression that there’s a stake involved. There is no stake – it’s up to you to do the evaluation or not, and it’s up to you to consider the generated feedback or not…
  • just because you took the eval process lightly, it doesn’t mean that you should take the generated feedback lightly… Make sure you identify problems, starting from general ones identified by analyzing the aggregated data, and work your way down to particular and individual ones. Make sure to prioritize them and address them properly. All of them. Give yourself and your management a deadline towards that. It’s important. It is worse to ask for feedback, receive it and do nothing, than to not ask for it at all…

I will soon follow with a short but very effective example of an evaluation form – one that you could be using in your company starting tomorrow. Well  not tomorrow, because I might not give it to you by tomorrow, but you get the picture… ;)

Update 1: Timing and frequency are key… Set your evaluation for periods when your employees’ activity is low, or normal in order to allow for them to really answer the questions, not just go through them. Set the frequency at no more than twice a year and no less than once a year.

Update 2: Avoid allowing a neutral answer in your multiple choice questions. A neutral answer is just like no answer at all. By choosing the neutral answer, a person avoids the question instead of answering it. That’s why sometimes people might choose the neutral answer in order not to make a fuss. And to you it might seem like you’re doing them a favor, but trust me, it is better to expose issues as early in the game as possible, rather than just allowing for them to boil underneath the surface.