Performance reviews are vital to your company’s overall success. Why? It clearly defines your expectations for your employees and gives them individual goals that will motivate them to strive for better performance. Having a concrete plan for your company and your employees ensures that everyone is working toward the same goals of excellence. But many business owners struggle with how to write a good performance review for an employee.
WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF A GOOD PERFORMANCE REVIEW?
Here are the basic and key elements that make up an effective performance scoring system:
- Clearly defined performance standards and goals
- An effective monitoring system
- Regular discussions of performance (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.)
- Development of clearly defined outline of rewards/consequences based on performance review
How to Write a Good Performance Review for an Employee and Communicate This
Performance evaluation should generally be a good experience, both for you and your employee. It is an effective tool to improve job performance and work ethic among the people that work for you. For the employee, it gives them a chance to be rewarded and complimented for their hard work. For the employer, it strengthens communication between them and their employees. And for both, it generates a commitment between both partners.
For an effective performance review, there must be rewards or consequences. Otherwise, there would be no incentive for the employee to value the commitment or to improve their performance.
REWARDS: If an employee receives an excellent or above average score on their review, they can be rewarded with raises, promotions, or more responsibilities. The rewards must be clearly defined in some way so that there are no misunderstandings of what is expected by each party.
CONSEQUENCES: If an employee gets a bad performance review, it is important for the employer not to ignore this and manage it in an appropriate way. For instance, for low performance, employees could receive a warning or probation with the understanding that if they do not improve, there will be consequences. Consequences should also be clearly defined so that both parties have a good understanding of the terms. If low performance is ignored, it provides a real disservice to the employer, employee, and company at large.
If your company doesn’t currently implement performance reviews or you need help with how to write a good performance review for an employee, please contact us to see how we can help you clearly define success for your company.