One of the essential duties of a supervisor is to conduct the annual employee review. Measuring performance is difficult, and communicating employee performance on the job can be very challenging. As a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience across various industries, Sonia Hodgin has a great deal of experience evaluating performance from a mentoring and consulting standpoint. Whether you’re a supervisor, consultant, or mentor, individuals should leverage their experience and any industry tools available to evaluate employee performance and make a more productive and successful year moving forward.
The best tools for a larger company may be fully automated databases and forms that help supervisors conduct employee reviews. Some programs have tracking for work tasks and are useful when compiling the list of yearly accomplishments. Smaller organizations may use a simple word processing document or spreadsheet to track progress and write reviews. Select the solution that fits the company’s size and style.
Traditional employee performance reviews are conducted solely by the supervisor. Recent trends in business call for a broader approach. Survey customers and peers that regularly interact with the employee. A variety of software programs are available which conduct surveys electronically and neatly summarize responses. Many companies extend the evaluation process beyond customers and colleagues and ask them to rate their performance.
Use the annual employee performance review as a tool to identify gaps in the company’s resources—budget and plan for future training courses based on areas where employees need to develop skills. Have a year-round mechanism for supervisors to track employee accomplishments regularly. It makes preparing the annual review much more manageable.
Whether you’re analyzing a peer’s annual performance or simply identifying opportunities within a team of your own, it’s crucial to track and decipher missed opportunities and successes accurately. For Sonia Hodgin, who has spent the better part of two decades analyzing people’s business and performance, she has found that more consistent and meaningful evaluations lead to happier and more productive employees. She has successfully established a skill set to evaluate performance and leverages that to help others professionally. For more information about Sonia Hodgin, visit her websites, or connect on LinkedIn!