Employee Performance Evaluation

Monitoring organizational efficiency and getting insights about further growth and improvement possibilities are some of the keys to impart stability and competence to firms. Since employees are assets of any firm, they have to be aware about the immense value of such evaluation. The report card of an employee reflects what he has done as an individual and in teams that has resulted in the success of the firm. Indeed employee evaluation is not a very easy task for managers as they have to consider many parameters while evaluating various work areas of employees. Nonetheless, such an evaluation is necessary for developing and implementing improvement plans for achieving long term business profits. Since cut throat competition is an integral part of today's business competition, perform or perish is supposedly the new age mantra for working professionals.

Tips
'How to evaluate employee performance' is a question that concerns many managers and recruiters in the firms. Generally, there are various methods for performance evaluation. A few of them are discussed here.

Ranking
In the ranking method, employee performance is analyzed by ranking employees from worst performers to best performers. Based on the performance, employee graphs are drawn and top performers are always on the top of chart, while worst performers are down the graph. This method is generally regarded negative as worst performers may feel demotivated to work. Besides that, rivalry among employees may trigger negative work environment and sometimes cause unhealthy competition.

Rating
In this method, employees are rated based on their traits that may include attitude towards work, punctuality, quantity and quality of work and team participation. The objective of this evaluation method is to foster employee motivation. One disadvantage of this criterion is that there is no well-defined evaluation scale for every trait and it may differ from one person to other.

Objective
This is by far, one of the most transparent and objective based employee performance evaluating methods. In this method, employees have to submit frequent reports about their targets. The employer sets specific targets for every employee and achieving or exceeding those targets is counted as a measure of performance. This method is popularly known as Management by Objectives (MBO). In this method, sometimes it may happen that in the quest to outperform another employee, a non cooperative work environment may be created in the work place. However, being objective oriented, this method certainly works better than others.

Multi-source Feedback
Multi-source feedback is an interesting employee performance evaluating method as in this process, the HR manager and employees give written feedback about the performance of an employee. Either they are asked to write a page or two defining the qualities and work of the employee or they are given certain options to evaluate the employee performance. This way of feedback is generally quite insightful for the management team as sometimes it can bring various flaws and limitations of work in the organization.

It all depends, on how well a firm responds to any specific set of evaluation methods. Since evaluation methods of employees vary significantly, many organizations use two to three types of evaluation methods to exactly track the potential of the employee and his performance.