Improving the Value and Efficiency
of Your Employee Performance Evaluation Process
Performance evaluations are something we often have a love/hate
relationship with. While we generally recognize their importance,
they take up a lot of time, and we sometimes question their
value. What benefits do employees, managers and companies
actually derive from them?
Whether or not you and your organization derive value from
your employee evaluation process depends on several things.
Start With an Effective Process
The true value of employee evaluations comes from the shared
dialogue between managers and their employees about goals,
performance, development needs and career aspirations. Ideally,
this should be an ongoing dialogue, with the manager coaching
and guiding the employee to increasing performance.
The goal of your performance evaluation process should be
to foster this ongoing dialogue and document it. If your process
is paper-based and annual, it’s likely not achieving
this. An automated talent management system can go a long
way to transforming your employee performance evaluation process
into a valuable one. They automate and streamline your process,
saving everyone valuable time. Some of the best performance
management systems provide employees and managers with
an online journal where they can record performance highlights
and incidents throughout the year. But best of all, they put
information on employee performance, goals and development
plans at the employee’s and manager’s fingertips,
so they encourage ongoing dialogue, feedback and coaching.
Help Your Manager Coach and Support Employees
and Give Effective Feedback
Not all managers are skilled at giving feedback, coaching
and developing their employees. Finding the right words and
resources can be a challenge, especially for less experienced
managers, and it takes considerable time.
Automated talent management systems can help by giving managers
guidance and support. They typically come equipped with competency
libraries that include detailed descriptions of the various
levels of competency demonstration, and comment “building
block” text that can be adjusted to give the employee
the detailed feedback they need to sustain or improve performance.
Many also provide coaching tips that managers can use and/or
include in their evaluations. Another key feature is built
in development planning, that give managers and employees
access to a list of your organization’s learning resources,
right within the performance evaluation, so they can assign
appropriate development activities to support the accomplishment
of goals or improve performance of a competency. All of these
features improve the quality and consistency of feedback,
coaching and development that your employees receive, while
saving your managers significant time in writing evaluations
– as much as 75%!
Make Employee Performance a Part of Your
Corporate Culture
To be truly effective, your employee performance evaluations
need to be an expression of a corporate culture that supports
employee
performance. You need to ensure that all employees receive
direction, feedback, coaching, support and development on
a regular basis.
One of the most common problems faced by companies with paper-based
performance
evaluation processes is low participation or on time completion
rates. If there’s no one reminding them to complete
their evaluations, and monitoring their progress, many managers
shirk this important responsibility. Plus, paperwork often
gets lost as it travels from managers to HR, with various
stops in between. The message to employees: supporting employee
performance isn’t really very important!
Here again, automated talent management applications can
help in several ways. By eliminating paper, no review will
ever get “lost in the mail” again. Automatic email
reminders let everyone one know when they have a task to complete
or one that is past due. HR and senior management get easy
to read reports that show them the status of every appraisal
and highlight bottlenecks in the process so they can be addressed.
And by making the whole process easier, faster to complete
and more valuable for everyone, they encourage participation.
Most companies who adopt an automated performance evaluation
tool see their on-time completion rates rise to between 95
and 100%.
From Dreaded Task to Valuable Tool
Performance evaluations don’t have to be a time-consuming
and onerous administrative exercise. Properly managed and
executed, they can be an invaluable way to support and encourage
goals, feedback, coaching and development for employees. Using
an automated tool like Halogen eAppraisal, can transform your
talent management process and help you and your organization
derive significant value from your performance appraisals.
hrVillage encourages you to take
an online tour of Halogen Software’s awarding winning
performance evaluation solution.
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