Key Strategies for Impactful Employee Evaluation

Employee evaluations are more than just a routine task; they are a vital tool for fostering growth and enhancing productivity. Without measuring performance, employers don’t know whether the employee is on track, stuck, or failing miserably at meeting their weekly KPIs. By approaching evaluation strategically, you can unlock your team’s full potential and drive your business forward.

You are not too busy for an employee evaluation

Let’s start with the basics. To evaluate your employee’s work, you must give them your time, attention, and presence.

When you repeatedly tell others you don’t have time to attend the daily meetings or you’re too busy to give your feedback and direction to finish a project, a gap starts to form in the relationship. When you tell yourself you’re busy, you adopt the mindset that there is never enough time. Your brain gets busy with endless distractions, anxieties, fears, worries, and to-do lists.

This relationship gap elicits resentment and poor communication. If you remain in this busyness mindset and don’t make time for pause, you will never see lasting change. Without the moments of silence, you will never know what’s working and what’s not working in your business, and you won’t be able to discern whether the people around you are on track or ready to walk out the door. Give yourself the gift of space and grace.

Bosses and employees can feel the tension of thundering schedules from one another. Both parties want to be heard, but they can’t find the right words to have that breakthrough conversation. This is where the pause comes in. Ultimately, the power of the pause leads to clarity, direction, and redirection in real-time. This creates empowerment and success. As you allow your thoughts to ruminate, you develop a powerful habit of thinking before speaking.

Many busy people don’t see a way around burnout. Burnout can be mitigated through effective staffing and employee empowerment. No matter what industry you work in, bosses and staff members want the same thing: peace in the workplace.

The power of attention

When managers and employees spend more time one-on-one, employees feel empowered. If you’re a boss, you need to carve out time in your company calendar to connect with members of the staff, either in-person or virtually, daily.

By setting aside this intentional time, you can identify fires when you need to be put out. Without taking a pause, huddles don’t exist. Pausing and coming together as a team proactively in a “locker room huddle” fashion to share what’s going on creates trust. And where trust lives, so do traction and respect.

The daily huddle can only be successful with consistent effort. I encourage bosses to treat this daily meeting like a locker room huddle before players run onto the playing field for the championship game. This gives the team the motivation and desire they need to successfully hear each other, listen well, and implement new tactics for growth.

By creating this framework, everyone involved will be used to coming into work, greeting each other, and discussing their agenda items for the day. By giving each other this time, the power of the pause will effectively create a stronger foundation for mutual respect and relationships of trust within your organization.

Here are the main rules for these meetings:

• The daily huddle doesn’t need to be longer than 15 minutes.
• The daily huddle must be held at the same time, in the same location, and for the same amount of time daily. Consistency is key.

People depend on and rely on these meetings. There is no resentment because these meetings-especially with a virtual model are to the point, efficient, and highly effective ways to communicate each other’s goals and discuss what’s on the business plate for the day.

Clarifying goals through employee evaluation

I’m a major advocate of team goals. Additionally, having each team member work on professional goals is a great way to keep everyone growing and playing on the team. Remember, if a talented employee runs out of new opportunities, they’ll look elsewhere for fulfillment. The same holds true if they don’t have balance in their personal and professional goals.

Our new team members begin goal setting at their thirty-day review. This gives them time to figure out the job basics. At thirty days, they may start feeling overwhelmed by how much they don’t know. Setting goals regarding necessary goals, receiving positive client feedback, and training will give them something to focus on, and they’ll be able to mark their progress.

The importance of team collaboration and feedback

Knowing everyone’s goals lets us all grow together. When everyone works together on goals, you become closer as a team, and your unique abilities shine. Your team can focus and work together, which avoids territorial issues, such as the marketing department thinking that they’re more important than the accounting department and accounting thinking that marketing spends too much money on frivolous stuff.

For example, if the company sets a quarterly revenue goal and brings every department on board, things that could cause strife end up generating excitement. Instead of thinking the marketing department is simply hosting a “fluffy cocktail hour,” the accounting department will see it as an event that will bring in a flood of new client appointments. They may even offer to help prepare a budget because that’s where they shine. The receptionist will look forward to making confirmation calls to help the event succeed. The cocktail hour has become a team event that benefits everyone.

And don’t forget about the power of feedback. According to Microsoft®, “Only 43 percent of employees can confidently say their company solicits employee feedback at least once a year— meaning over half of the companies (57 percent) may rarely, if ever, ask and hear about their employees’ experience at work.

And even if their company is collecting feedback, 75 percent of employees (and 80 percent of managers) think it’s not often enough, and 75 percent of business decision-makers say it’s not actionable enough.” To begin, we must get clear about the roles. Ask yourself:

• What’s the company onboarding process?
• Do you have your daily hurdles with your team? What is the purpose?
• What is your quarterly employee growth plan?
• What is each employee’s role in the company?
• What does each person need to accomplish so the company moves forward and is taken care of?

The role of feedback in employee retention

Feedback is critical to retaining top talent in today’s workplace. When employees don’t think their companies drive change based on feedback, they’re more than twice as likely to consider leaving within the year. When all team members work on creating trust, meeting goals, and clarifying communication, everyone can help achieve more productivity all around.

Always focus on people. You can grow a team that operates efficiently, understands your processes and systems, executes marketing efforts without a hitch, and effectively makes trustworthy business decisions. All you have to do is trust this process, spend time with your employees, and establish realistic professional goals.

Molly McGrath

Molly McGrath is the Founder of Hiring & Empowering Solutions and the author of Amazon’s #1 Best Seller, “Fix My Boss: The Simple Plan to Cultivate Respect, Risk Courageous Conversations, and Increase the Bottom Line.” With over 20+ years of experience in the legal and CEO space, Molly is a nationally renowned thought leader. Since the late nineties, she has coached, consulted, and guided presidents and founders of national organizations and over 5,000 law firms in executive-level leadership, continuous improvement, and team empowerment initiatives.