When writing a performance evaluation, there are two important aspects to measure, accountability and efficiency. Traditionally, HR departments and managers spend a greater proportion of their time writing employee performance evaluations that measures accountability while ignoring the larger aspects relating to an employee’s effectiveness.
As a result, the real power behind employee evaluations is lost because the evaluations are written primarily to expose and document issues relating to accountability. At the end of the year when bonuses are dispersed in an attempt to reward and motivate the most profitable employees, companies end up losing their investment to status quo when employees are rewarded in conjunction with the scores they earned in accountability based performance evaluations.
It is easy to comprehend why evaluations are written in such a fashion. Examples of employee evaluation questions that measure accountability include, “Does the employee complete all work on time,” and, “How well does the employee respect authority.” It is easy for managers to write and evaluate managers following this method.
Efficiency is understandably, a difficult metric to record. The questions used in an evaluation must be tailor made. For example, examine the issue of resource allocation. For every decision, an employee makes, she or he will usually have more than one option or route to use their resources on.
Evaluating efficiency is done in three primary ways. First, evaluate employees at the conclusion of each major project. Second, HR directors must train managers to create questions that evaluate the employee’s actions in contract with the company’s vision and mission statements. And last, efficiency questions evaluate not only the course followed, but alternate paths.
Pursing these three points of evaluating will help motivate employees to discover more profitable angles. Therefore, managers must be more involved with evaluating specific questions of employees.
In many more cases, performance evaluations ought to measure the potency of their human capital through the use of questions that focus on efficiency. Asking these types of questions will allow companies to steer and gain traction in a competitive business environment.
Employees’ wise decisions typically are evaluated long after their projects are completed. However the decisions can (and should) be evaluated much earlier. The wise decisions of your employees typically are evaluated long after projects come to completion, but can be evaluated in greater proximity to the event when remembering efficiency.