The Dreaded Employee Evaluation

leadership Apr 08, 2020

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the worst and 10 being the best, rate the employee for the following:   

  • Attendance
  • Attitude
  • Skillset
  • Getting along with others
  • Kissing Butt
  • Other topics you can only guess their skill level

Rating Other Peoples Performance

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.

An Alternative To Evaluating Employees

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 Self Evaluation System

The secret to this system is simple.  It's the instructions to the employee.  Here they are:

  • Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 for each element.   
         1=Wost   10=Impossible to do better
  • 5  is the "Average" score, where you simply do the job that is expected, no less and no more.  No comment is necessary.
  • 1,2,3,4 are below average.  If you score these, then you must explain why and what you will do to improve the score before the next evaluation.
  • 6,7,8,9,10 are above average.  If you score these, then you must explain what you feel you have done to earn this score.

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.  

People Typically Underrate Their Performance

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

Now the only these questions remain:

  • When will YOU implement an employee self-evaluation system?
  • What questions and categories will you include in your assessment form?

And the last, perhaps hardest question:

How will YOU grade YOUR OWN performance using the same criteria?

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