Employee evaluation: Benefits, tips, and examples

An employee evaluation is a performance review that occurs regularly between an employee and their direct manager during their tenure with a company. Some companies use monthly employee evaluations to measure progress, while others opt for a yearly review structure.

In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of employee evaluations, outline how to conduct effective ones, and demonstrate how companies can use this performance feedback structure to improve performance. 

Regular employee evaluations help HR teams understand how employees perform, if they feel supported in their roles, and how to support their career development. Beyond just an opportunity to discuss performance, evaluations can help shape an employee’s career and contribute to high levels of job satisfaction.

Employee evaluations are also the perfect medium for employee recognition, allowing managers to highlight employees’ important work and its impact on the company.

There are several benefits to employee evaluations:

Across the board, employee evaluations can contribute to a productive, supportive, and enjoyable workplace.

Related reading: Why employees crave more training and how employers aren’t delivering it

While employee evaluation meetings can have numerous benefits, poor execution can turn them into negative experiences that employees dread.

Here are a few steps to follow when conducting your employee evaluations: 

Before launching an employee evaluation, checking in with your employees and seeing how they feel about their recent performance is always a good idea. Self-guided evaluations can help you better understand performance from your employee’s perspective. 

Send out an employee self-evaluation form, which includes questions like:

A self-evaluation form should allow employees to share honest thoughts about their performance and any factors that may have impacted it throughout the review period. Using questions that help to check whether or not an employee feels supported by your organization will help you understand their recent levels of work.

Self-evaluations also allow employees to share any specific training opportunities they’re interested in or development needs they may have with their managers or evaluator. 

Related reading: Top questions for employee self-evaluation: Examples & tips.

Managers make or break an employee evaluation. A well-trained manager will conduct the evaluation in a way that shares employee feedback without criticizing or patronizing the employee. 

Being a manager requires a great deal of empathy and tact. Training can provide them with the skills necessary to share vital and sensitive information in a way that benefits the employee. If an employee’s performance has declined, managers should be able to contribute to a solution and support the employee during an improvement plan rather than making them feel upset. 

Whether the manager is new to the company or the role, they should still undergo training focused on employee evaluations. They’ll need to understand how to give an assessment that meets the company’s policies, guidelines, and values. 

After managers complete their evaluation training, you can send a post-training survey to measure the effectiveness of the sessions and identify areas for improvement. 

Writing an employee evaluation is an important part of the process. Although the 1-1 meeting will be the main focus of the evaluation, a written document can be useful for the employees' and managers' records and tracking changes over time. 

You don’t have to start from scratch when drafting an employee evaluation. Pre-built templates can streamline the evaluation process and make performance reviews easy. You can also use performance review surveys to identify the main areas you should cover in your evaluation.

Typically, you want to split an employee evaluation into the following areas:

Some of these areas of your performance report will require information from the employee yourself. That’s where their self-evaluation comes in. 

A 360-degree employee performance review survey will offer coworkers the opportunity to give feedback to their team members. These surveys work on different hierarchical levels, allowing employees to give feedback to their managers and vice versa. A 360-degree performance review will measure everything from collaboration and teamwork to productivity and attitude at work.

Collecting data with an employee performance review of this kind will help to create a holistic image of an employee. When you only collect data from one manager, their personal opinions could skew the data and lead to an overly favorable or lacking review. When you ask every connected team member for their opinion, you create a more honest and complete picture of an employee.

Be sure to utilize other employee feedback forms to help you create the best possible employee evaluations.

Related reading: Creating an effective employee feedback culture

Employee feedback is closely tied to performance, satisfaction, and employee churn. When your business invests in creating a feedback culture where you regularly share evaluations with employees, you build a strong foundation for all of your employees.

With SurveyMonkey, you can rapidly collect data, allow employees to share their opinions, and transform your performance management process over time.