When it comes to assessing employee performance, it’s always a tricky balancing act for human resource professionals. On one hand, you want to be as objective as possible as you try to gauge an employee’s quantifiable productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, you also have to recognize that your employees are actual human beings and that they aren’t just mere statistics that you can quantify into a single number. This is why it’s absolutely crucial for human resource professionals to continually reassess their own methodologies on how they assess their employee performance. You must establish clear objectives and key results (OKRs) when you’re strategizing a framework for evaluation.
Keep in mind that the findings of these assessments can lead to key decisions within the company such as promotions, bonuses, and raises. Aside from that, conducting regular employee assessments will allow both management and employees to understand what their strengths are and where they can improve in terms of their job performance. With that said, here are a few things you want to keep in mind when you’re conducting your employee evaluations:
Highlight Clear Performance Standards
At the outset, it’s very important that you establish concrete and measurable performance standards that your employees can understand and assess for themselves. It’s imperative that employees understand what their roles and responsibilities are within the team and what they’re accountable for. Enforcing these standards for all employees in a uniform manner will eliminate subjective biases and will allow employees to fully comprehend what is expected of them. For example, one basic expectation that you can set for performance standards is attendance and punctuality. With an interactive system like Payruler, employees are granted access to specific features that will allow them to monitor their daily time records and attendance. All of this is possible with the Empower module that allows employees to actively track their footprint within the company. This will let them know if they’re performing up to standard or not.
Set Specific Individual Goals for Each Employee
While setting universal standards is important to establish a sense of uniformity within the company, it’s also essential that you take the time to set specific individual goals for each employee as well. Keep in mind that every member of each department will have different skill sets that produce different outputs. This means that you need to assess their output based on what is expected of them individually within the context of their roles as members of a specific team or unit. Check out this article as a reference on some important KPIs that you can use to evaluate employees.
Track Individual Employee Performance
As an HR professional, you need to take it upon yourself to actively monitor the individual performance of every employee in the company. This can be very hard to do when you’re working with so many different departments that host a number of different employees. Fortunately, with technological features like the Identify module in Payruler. It’s an all-in-one tracking platform that allows HR professionals to easily access vital information like 201 files, employee disciplinary history, employee status, and other details pertaining to an employee’s performance.
Give Honest and Concrete Feedback
When you’re giving feedback toward an employee, make sure that you’re being constructive. That’s the most important thing. But aside from that, it’s also important that you’re being direct and concrete. This piece from the Corporate Finance Institute has a simple 5-step process on how to give constructive feedback. Your employees need to really understand where they’re lacking and how they can improve. If you give ambiguous or vague assessments, then they might not really be able to figure out what they’re doing wrong and wouldn’t be able to improve their job performance. Maintain your respect and decency, but don’t be afraid to go into the details on how they can do their jobs better.
Stay as Objective as Possible
“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility.” – Erich Fromm
While it’s important to maintain a sense of humanity when it comes to evaluating employees, there’s absolutely no room for biased judgement. Any evaluation that’s done on an employee should be as impartial as possible. Evaluations should solely be based on merits and performance, not merely on a person’s attitude or overall demeanor. It’s a lot easier to justify employee assessments when they’re backed up by actual quantifiable data as opposed to just biased perspectives and annotations.
Gather Feedback in Return
Aside from making sure that you assess your employee performance properly, you also need to make a conscious effort to gather feedback. You could do this either through face-to-face conversations (or virtual private sessions) or through standardized reports throughout departments. The Analyze module on Payruler makes it so easy and convenient for HR members to access and download over 70 standard reports across all the core modules, including employee performance and feedback.
Conclusion
Ultimately, evaluating and assessing employee performance is both a science and an art. This is why HR must find a way to tread the line of sentimentality and objectivity appropriately when measuring employee performance. HR professionals must use whatever tools are available at their disposal to do the best work possible.
If you’re interested in upgrading your internal evaluation and assessment system to a more streamlined and systemized platform, then feel free to give Payruler a try. We’re offering lucky readers a chance to try a demo version of our platform absolutely free. See and experience the difference with Payruler by clicking on the link now.
