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Assessment & Evaluation

Published May 2008

Make the Connection: Effective Employee Evaluations

Lindsay Edmonds Wickman

 

Those who grew up in the 1970s may remember the age of the irascible boss. Think grizzly character Lou Grant from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," who was known for phrases such as: "If I don't like you, I'll fire you! If you don't like me, I'll fire you!"

These are the words of a manager who didn't pat his employees on the back, yelled when things weren't looking good and gave performance evaluations via one-way conversation. In today's workplace, these behaviors won't work. As the fight for talent becomes more competitive, conducting effective evaluations and providing valuable employee feedback become particularly important as development and retention tools.

Employee Evaluations Done Right

For an evaluation to work, managers can no longer sit down with an employee just once a year. The evaluation has to be part of a more expansive feedback system.

"I hate to use the analogy of a parent, but it's so true," said Kathy Anthony, a Professional in Human Resources (PHR) and partner at accounting and consulting firm O'Sullivan Creel LLP. "If I only tell you to do something once, and then I don't come back and reinforce [it], you lose a lot of that effectiveness. If you set goals and expectations, and you let people go a year failing to meet them and you're not having conversations throughout, you really lose credibility."

Providing frequent feedback can diminish some of the angst associated with evaluations. If employees know where they stand prior to the review, there's nothing to fear.

"When it comes time for a performance evaluation, there shouldn't be any surprises," said Melanie Holmes, vice president of World of Work Solutions for Manpower, an employment services company. "If the manager is doing his or her job all year, they're not going to wait until performance evaluation time to say something either positive or negative."

If done correctly, reviews can be a powerful tool in retaining employees. When the evaluation is a two-way conversation, the employee walks away feeling his or her opinions are valued. But a mutual discussion requires both employees and managers to be active participants.

"The first thing an employee needs to do is take responsibility to make the evaluation effective, which means they need to prepare," Holmes said. "They need to be thinking about their strengths and weaknesses in an honest way, and walk in with facts about what went well and what didn't go well during the period. If things didn't go well, they can present a plan for making it better. One of the great things about a performance evaluation is it gives the employee the opportunity to tell the employer what they need from a development perspective."

This type of collaborative review process should not be exclusive to a certain workforce population. Every individual in a company needs to be thoroughly and frequently evaluated.