Hard numbers provide concrete evidence of the accomplishments of your employees, but they don’t do a great of measuring soft skills that lead to further success. Likewise, employee feedback that focuses only on soft skills, like how well an employee communicates, doesn’t provide management with an outcome in terms of raw capability or productive output.

Measuring both at the same time is the key to better understanding how to monitor the performance of your employees, particularly for jobs that require both.

Hard skills are typically defined as abilities and aptitudes in topic where the rules don’t change. STEM occupations are typical examples of professions that require a great deal of hard skills, like mathematics, science, programming, engineering and other related subjects.

Testing and measuring hard skills revolves around verifying the candidates ability to generate the correct result according to the variables provided and the desired outcome. One example would be measuring the ability of a computer programmer to successfully solve issues with code. By determining how long an employee takes to create solutions and the volume of work required to achieve programming goals, a company can figure out the staff member’s coding ability compared to other members of the team.

Soft skills tend to revolve around communication, language, persuasion and other fields that don’t directly require precise mathematics, science or programming. Instead, soft skills rely on emotional intelligence and the ability to empathize with others Measuring an employee’s ability to use their soft skills while on the job is difficult because of the subjectivity involved in interpreting language and other imprecise information.

In these cases, it’s useful to gather as much information as possible about how a staff member gets along with everybody involved with your company. Employee evaluation processes such as 360 degree feedback tools allow peers, customers and management to give their opinion on how your staff member conducts their business at work.

Obtaining opinions from as many sources as possible helps to eliminate the bias that can take place when relying on a single point of view when trying to determine how well an employee gets along with customers and team members.

If your employee evaluations aren’t showing you any return on investment or employee improvements, it’s time to change that.

Grapevine Evaluations is the go-to choice for companies such as Pandora Radio, Thompson Reuters, and Macy’s. Isn’t it time that you found out how 360 degree employee performance reviews can help your company? Contact us today to schedule a one-on-one demo!