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How to Make the Most of Employee Reviews

Apr 4, 2022

How to make the most of employee reviews

Employee reviews are instrumental to employee and organizational growth. It’s a corporate activity that’s beneficial to both the employees and employers when done correctly. Employee review is an evaluation process that sheds more light on an employee’s performance to see if they align with the company’s goals.   

Employee review is also known as a performance review or employee evaluation. Many organizations review employees annually, but here at CRC, we evaluate employees monthly to create a better working environment for our team members.   

This is because we believe in evaluating employee performance to help us understand how to improve their weaknesses and increase their strengths. Our managers and HR team head performance evaluation with the assistance of other employees. Others involved include the heads of department, line managers, supervisors, team leaders, and even other employees.   

Before we go into how we make the most of our employee reviews, let’s define what employee reviews mean.   

What is an employee review?   

An employee review is an evaluation process administered by managers to employees to ascertain their weaknesses and strengths to get feedback on how to improve employee performance.   

What makes up employee reviews?   

Employee reviews are different in every organization, but at CRC, we focus on these five core areas:  

  1. Quality of work input  
  2. Teamwork  
  3. Communication skills 
  4. Problem-solving abilities  
  5. Punctuality at work  

How to make the most of employee reviews  

  1. Plan your employee reviews  

Planning connotes getting everything you’ll need ready for the employee evaluation. Everything you need includes your feedback, forms, reports, and findings. Because unplanned reviews lead to unsuccessful reviews, it’s not enough to invite an employee for evaluation but to also have feedback ready for them.   

Planning employee reviews helps you stay on course — you focus on what’s important. With the information you have, you can ask the employee important questions about work and properly document their response.   

  1. Make it conversational 

Performance evaluation will look like an interrogation if it’s one-sided. Leave the conversation open to listen and understand the employee’s point of view.   

Most times, honest conversations reveal intentions more than any form could. Forms have their place, but making the evaluation conversational helps make the whole process easier.   

To start off on the right foot, we make our employees feel comfortable airing their opinions and make records of their responses. It helps reflect and make better decisions regarding the employees and other related issues.  

  1. Don’t focus only on shortcomings   

Performance evaluations should also touch on the good, bad, strong, and weak sides of the employees. If you only focus on their shortcomings without giving due accolades, it will look like unbalanced criticism. While you offer honest feedback on their weaknesses, also give them praise for what they’re doing well. That way, they’ll see fairness in your assessments, feel valued, and will likely be retained.   

This is one of the reasons we created our employee spotlight monthly blog posts. It’s a way to highlight some of our highest-performing employees every month.   

  1. Make your evaluation growth-driven  

The main purpose of an employee review is to measure employees’ growth and evaluate to ensure that performance still aligns with the company’s goal. So, if your evaluation isn’t growth-driven, it will fail.   

To achieve this, we make employees feel that we’re on their side — it’s for their growth and that of the company. A growth-driven employee review process focuses on the employee’s performance and not their personality.   

It’s easy to mix up an employee’s performance and their personalities, which you should avoid. As long as such personalities don’t interfere with their performance, they’re inconsequential.   

  1. Act upon the information received from the evaluation 

It’s one thing to review employee performance, and it’s another thing to act on your findings. Surprisingly, many companies do employee evaluations but ignore their findings. Nonchalance toward findings from employee reviews has negative effects on the employees and organizations. Employees will get the impression that they aren’t heard, while the organization suffers due to lack of implementation.   

If you notice employees aren’t performing well in a particular area, advise them to take courses to improve their performance. If they communicate poorly, provide them with better channels of communication and encourage effective communication. If they’re underperforming due to burnout (something many workers have been battling over the last couple of years due to the pandemic), let them take their PTO.   

Many, if not all, of these suggestions can be used to keep employees engaged in a variety of industries and businesses. For the team at Capital Recovery, following the strategies we’ve outlined here has helped us increase employee retention and performance, two things that we value in creating a strong, successful company.