Remember peer evaluations in school? There was a tacit agreement that if you gave your friends a good evaluation, they’d return the favor. In the workplace, peer evaluations are considerably rarer, partly due to challenges around anonymity, and largely due to companies taking a more traditional approach to performance appraisal.

Fortunately, the paradigm is shifting to a more holistic approach whereby the employee can be evaluated from multiple angles: by their own self-assessment as well as by managers, customers, vendors, support staff, other departments, and even their peers. This 360 degree feedback can be a more accurate measure of an employee’s performance; after all, a manager might only witness a tiny percentage of their employee’s daily contribution to the company, while the people who work alongside her are much better positioned to comment on her performance.

With teams becoming ubiquitous in Canadian workplaces, it has become apparent that peers might be better evaluators of their colleagues’ behaviours than, say, time-honoured personality tests like the Myers-Briggs.

There are obvious potential pitfalls to peer assessments, such as tension among co-workers. What, then, are the principal benefits of having peers fill out employee evaluation forms on their co-workers?

Peer assessments work best in an environment where there is generally good morale and a spirit of cooperation; in this milieu, employees are typically receptive to the concept of rating each other. The scores on the employee evaluation forms can later be averaged out by the HR manager to eliminate any possible biases of fellow employees.

A well-designed peer assessment questionnaire should include:

Depending on the culture of your office, the degree of competitiveness among your staff, and the climate in which feedback has traditionally been given and received, a peer evaluation can be a wonderful tool to identify the kinds of people you want to retain and promote.