As a business leader, you need to make sure that your workers are measuring up to company standards. It can be hard to properly evaluate individuals’ performance when everyone is living in different circumstances and has a different level of work. But this becomes even more difficult when there are changes in your company or the surrounding environment. Here are tips to make evaluating performance fairly and more efficiently:
Compare with Others
To make a good judgement of somebody’s performance you need to have an idea of how they should be performing. To do this, look at other people with similar jobs and what they are doing. For example, if the employee is in sales and all their co-workers are making around five phone calls a day, then you know five phone calls is the standard and anything above or below that is abnormal.
Additionally, paying attention to the average performance of a team can help you factor out environmental changes. For example, if all the employees on the sales team are having a dip in closes, you may be able to determine that the cause is an environmental change, not just a drop in motivation in one individual.
Compare with Self
Even if you’ve established a baseline using co-workers and employees in similar jobs, it can still be hard to tell if an employee is improving or not. For this, you want to compare the employee to their past self. Save data from other performance reviews in past months, and before evaluating the employee’s performance, take some time to read through them. This will give you a good idea of where the employee was in the past and how far they’ve come. Make sure to let your employees know what areas they’ve improved and where they’ve stayed stagnate. This will help you to give accurate feedback as well as help your employees improve their work quality.
Set Future Goals
Now that you know how to evaluate performance currently, you still need to establish how you will evaluate performance in the future. A good way to do this is to set goals for development and improvement. Create these goals with the employee and record them. This will make it so both you and the employee will know how they will be evaluated during the new review period.
Evaluating your employee’s performance is an important part of every leader’s job. Use this advice to make sure that you and your employees are happy with your performance evaluations.