The power of feedback

“When feedback is abundant and regularly given, a set of firmly held self-perceptions is formed.” The return on employee evaluations investment lies in the frequent and timely completion of the feedback cycle. Employees value assessments as a thermostat of their value as  perceived by the employer. The employer values employee assessments as a tool to improve employee performance.

 

• Performance data: Assessments must be based on measured and stored data. There must be evidence of performance and measures of its quality. However, if quality is not easily quantified, it is not a metric.
• Select information: The data should be relevant to the work and behavior at work. There are many aspects of employee behavior that have no bearing on performance or the work at stake. For example, creativity may not be a relevant metric for a machine operator. Only the relevant has value.
• Employee options: The data saved and reported must lead to clear paths for the employee. The options might be as simple as continuing the path or reversing the process. On the other hand, the middle path is often harder to define.
• Corrective action: The assessment must produce a plan of action to reinforce or rectify the behavior. The feedback cycle completes with the scheduling of the next feedback event.

 

Why you should invest in 360 review software

1. People find traditional employee reviews to be too stressful

Most people simply don’t know how to conduct performance reviews, especially when they are negative. As Tara Perker-Pope of the New York Times mentioned in a recent blog post, a poorly conducted employee review “can damage physical and mental health, as well as productivity.”

360 review software, on the other hand, is designed to provide the most effective possible employee reviews without damaging the psyche of your employees.

2. Feedback from managers rarely hits the mark

Managers are ineffective reviewers for a number of reasons. Their reviews are usually brief, include arbitrary praise and are biased. As Eric Jackson of Forbes reports, this gets the employee review done, “But how does a report take that as feedback and improve their job performance in the next year?” With 360 review software, you can accurately make the assessments you need to evaluate an employee’s performance and provide effective feedback.

3. Underperforming employees shouldn’t be surprised when they are let go

You don’t want to develop a reputation for firing people without warning because this makes it difficult to hire talent in the future. However, a bad review process can lead to this. This is because most employee reviews are neither thorough nor accurate enough for employees to clearly see that their performance is dragging down the team. Good 360 review software provides employees with clear and accurate depictions of their performance, so they can understand why they are let go.

4. Bad employee reviews have caused you to stop reviewing

As mentioned earlier, nobody really likes to do reviews. Combine this with lack of clear results and you are likely to scrap the review process all together. 360 review software make reviews easier while guaranteeing usable results; this gives you a reason to relaunch your review process.

5. 360 review software will help you identify opportunities to promote from within

As Kate Stull of pop forms recently mentioned, if your reviews aren’t clearly depicting an employee’s progress, “you can come away with no better idea of how a good employee became great.” This includes opportunities to get the most out of an employee by putting them into a leadership role.



When should you invest in employee evaluations?

A business’s investment in employee evaluations is an issue of policy, time, and employee engagement.

 

• Policy: A typical policy might require a department manager to conduct assessments at the end of a new hire’s probation period and annually thereafter.
• Time: Training is time intensive, and the delegation of annual assessments might require an hour/employee. Quarterly reviews might require 30-minutes/employee, and daily feedback takes only seconds. Obviously, for a sizable workforce, this takes strategic delegation and allocation of time.
• Engagement: Training employees in how assessment serves their self-interest and talent development pays for itself in making time more productive and feedback more valued.

 

Making your employee evaluations investment pay!

Without leadership, managers typically hate the process, and employees focus solely on whether or not there is a pay raise attached. Such managers have not been well-trained, and their employees have low expectations.



An effective corporate policy would do better to train managers and employees thoroughly in the cost and consequence of effective assessments. It would hold managers accountable for conducting formal assessments as frequently as quarterly and for providing immediate and frequent positive informal feedback. When should your business invest fully in employee evaluations? Always!