On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst and 10 being the best, rate the employee for the following:
I don't know who hates employee evaluations more. The person getting the evaluation or the person doing the evaluation.
If you are like I am, I absolutely hate doing performance evaluations. Typically I know how the person functions in general, but to have to do a performance evaluation for them is often semi-guessing. I think this is why it's one of the tasks I hate the most. Evaluations are a two-edged sword for me. If I overrate someone, there is a lost opportunity to help them improve. If I underrate them, they are either upset or ticked off at me. It's rare when either of these outcomes doesn't occur.
Over decades of having to do these evaluations (and trying my hardest to avoid them), I have come up with an alternative that works. It avoids nearly all of the downfalls of this process and it removes most of the work from me. It's having the employees do ...
The secret to this system is simple. It's the instructions to the employee. Here they are:
Then when it's completed, go over the self-evaluation with the employee and let them explain each rating they provided. Negative ratings are discussed with improvement points established. These are only held against the employee if they repeat from evaluation to evaluation. Positive ratings must be justified and defended by the employee and must be supportive of the numeric grade they gave themself.
Using this system, I have made my life infinitely easier with reduced stress. Typically these reviews become improvement coaching sessions. Often upgrades to the assessment are made in the meeting rather than downgrades, with your good employees. For bad employees, they only have to have one evaluation experience where they have to defend inappropriately high self-assessments. They either improve ... or document their own demise and dismissal. They understand the system pretty quickly
And the last, perhaps hardest question:
How will YOU grade YOUR OWN performance using the same criteria?
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