Refresh Your Employee Performance Review Process

As a business owner, it is imperative to have an employee evaluation to measure your employees’ overall performance in your agency. In today’s world, more and more companies are focusing on performance management. Businesses are now required to become more efficient, execute better business strategies, and accomplish more tasks with fewer employees in order to remain competitive. Reviews should be conducted at all levels within your organization, from your managers to your customer service representatives. An employee performance review is a great way to motivate your staff, identify training needs, gauge an employee’s professional development, and measure their overall contribution and fit to help your agency reach its goals.

In order to have an effective employee review process, the first step is to start with establishing goals and performance standards to hold all employees accountable. These goals can be as simple as ensuring your staff arrives to the office on time every morning or as robust as ensuring your staff is hitting all of their renewal or sales numbers. Your goals should also contain long and short term targets. When setting goals the most widely-used framework is S-M-A-R-T.

• Specific – Ensure you goals are defined as to inform employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much. Specific goals help managers easily measure progress towards completing that goal.
• Measurable – You should provide milestones to track progress and motivate your staff to achieve hitting these goals.
• Attainable – Goals should be achievable, with some effort, by your average employee, not too high but not too low either.
• Relevant – Your goals should be focused on what will have the greatest impact on your overall agency strategy
• Time-Bound – Ensure your staff has enough time to achieve these goals. However, you also don’t want too long of a time to undermine performance. Goals without strict deadlines will be forgotten when day-to-day crises happen.

When the review period is over and it is time to conduct the review, there are a few things you should bring up.

• Evaluate your employees’ accomplishment of the goals that were set for this review period
• Recap positive and negative events, interactions, attitudes, and productivity
• Assess individual and team strengths, as well as any limitations or obstacles
• Identify a need for any additional training if goals were not met
• With your employees, create the next set of goals by which each employee will be held accountable. If you allow your staff into this process, they could become more motivated to achieve the goals that were laid out for them.
• Identify growth opportunities and professional development. Whether that be a promotion or monetary gain, you should push your employees to grow professionally and use the goals as stepping stones to reach the next level.

In a perfect world, all of your employees would achieve the goals set for them for this review period. If an employee is not achieving the goals that have been set, you now have an administrative and legitimate paper trail to prove negligence or willful disobedience of an employer. Written documentation is more effective than verbal reprimands in addressing poor performance or poor attitudes.

A formal employee review process is a necessary tool that every business owner should use to their advantage to get staff members on the right page. This will help your agency motivate your staff, identify training needs, encourage professional development, and stay on course in achieving your overall business strategy and goals.