You want to assess how one of your staff has done over the past few months, so you run through it in your head. What comes back is the last two or three things that happened: the job they handled well last week, or the mistake they made yesterday. The rest of those months has almost entirely faded.
From those scattered snapshots you build an overall judgment and tell them what it is. Your intentions are good, but what you measured was how you feel about that person these days, not the work they actually did over the period.
What exactly is an employee performance evaluation?
A performance evaluation means sitting down and comparing the work someone did over a period with the result they were supposed to reach. Methods like 360-degree feedback were built for organizations with hundreds of employees, and in a team of five they have little practical use.
Evaluation is only one part of performance management: the moment you pass judgment on someone’s work. If that judgment is not fair, the person will not accept it, and nothing you say afterwards will change how they work.
Why is judging by feel never fair?
Without a clear yardstick you have to judge from memory and gut feeling, and neither gives you a true picture of the person’s work across the whole period. Imagine two people who did exactly the same amount of work over those months, except that in the final week the first pulled off something impressive and the second made a small mistake. Without meaning to, you rate the first one higher, because the final week is what stands out in your mind.
Your relationship with each person also shapes your judgment. You unconsciously rate the people you get along with more highly, even when their results are weaker than everyone else’s.
This is not only a small-business problem. When Deloitte reviewed its own appraisal process, it found that the ratings managers gave said more about the manager’s own tastes than about the work of the person being rated, and this was while the company was spending close to two million hours a year on that process. In a small team with no standard form and no written criteria, the effect is even stronger.
You can only fairly measure a result set in advance
The only way to measure fairly is to know what you are measuring before the period begins. If you have already defined the result you want from each role, you do not need to lean on memory when evaluation time comes: you simply set the finished work beside that result. That result belongs in the role’s job description.
Three things usually get mixed up in an evaluation. The first is how busy the person was, the second is how pleasant and organized they seem, and the third is what result they actually produced. Only the third can be measured fairly, because it is the only one that you and the employee can both look at against the same shared standard.
How do you run the evaluation?
Once your yardstick is a result set in advance, the evaluation itself comes down to four simple steps, with no complicated form or software.
- Take notes during the period. Whenever something important happens, good or bad, write it down in one line that same day. Then at evaluation time you have a list covering the whole period, and the last two or three events carry far less weight in your judgment.
- Set the finished work beside the agreed result. The right question is whether the result that was supposed to be delivered was delivered, and if not, where it fell behind. Do not score the person as a whole.
- Ask for the employee’s view. Ask what they think went well and where they got stuck. They usually know better than you where the problem was, and when they feel heard they accept the outcome of the evaluation more easily.
- End with one concrete step. By the end it should be clear what will change in the next period and what the first thing to do is. If all you give is a score, nothing about the work will be different next week.
In a team of five, each person is a fifth of your entire workforce, so one wrong evaluation directly affects the output of the whole business. Systemization is how you build the roles, and a fair evaluation is how you see whether each role delivered its result.
Where to start
Pick one role in your team and write down exactly what result you want from it. If you cannot write it down, the problem is not the evaluation: you have not yet defined that role’s result, so start there. If you can, begin noting the important events in that person’s work today, so that at the end of the period you have a real list in front of you instead of your memory.
And if you find you cannot define a measurable result for the roles in your team, in a free diagnostic session we will set measurable results for those roles together.