How to Ensure Consistency in Employee Performance Appraisals

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Giving feedback is often a very subjective process, with every manager having their own standards and way of defining and evaluating performance. However, with many other business and HR process using performance evaluation information as input, it is important for an organization to ensure consistency and fairness in employee ratings, as well as in the quality of feedback given to employees. So how do you ensure that your employees are getting fair, consistent reviews?

 

Choose the Right Way to Evaluate Competencies

The way you evaluate competencies can have a big impact on the consistency of employee performance appraisals.

Your first decision is whether to have a standard set of competencies that you evaluate all employees against, a different set of competencies for every job or employee, or a combination of standard and job/department specific competencies. Having a standard set of core competencies to evaluate all employees against is one of the key ways you can introduce consistency in your employee reviews, as well as encourage corporate culture and values, which ultimately strengthen your organization.

Our award winning employee assessment software, Halogen eAppraisal™, comes equipped with a standard library of competencies that you can easily modify or extend to match the needs of your organization. You can also use the optional Lominger Leadership Architect® Library, or any other third party library in addition to Halogen's competency library.

Your second decision is how to evaluate employees' performance of the competencies you've chosen. Halogen eAppraisal gives you a choice of four methods: no rating, short rating, long rating and matrix rating. You can rate competencies using a 2-15 point scale and can weight them as well.

• With the no rating style, evaluators simply provide comments about the employee's performance of a competency.
• With the short rating style, evaluators are asked to rate performance on a simple scale, using short behavior descriptions (e.g. met expectations) and providing additional comments if desired.
• With the long rating style, evaluators rate performance using detailed behavior descriptions and providing additional comments as needed. The long rating style is particularly helpful if consistency in performance expectations is a concern.
• The checklist/matrix rating style allows you to capture a number of different rating criteria and comments in a compact space by putting all competencies in a table/matrix format. In addition to providing a rating on performance you can also capture information like the frequency of performance, the method of observation, the date of observation, etc.

 

Solicit Input from a Secondary Manager or Third-Party Reviewer

There are many different work contexts where it can be challenging for a manager to provide performance feedback for an employee: shift work; project or team based work, especially if they are cross-functional; and new or fluid reporting structures, are but a few. Halogen eAppraisal provides managers with three different tools for addressing these challenges. A manager can appoint a secondary manager for an employee, allowing that secondary manager access to the employee's performance records. A manager can also assign performance management responsibility to another manager for a review process. This is especially useful in the case of internal transfers or promotions, where the new manager has insufficient experience with an employee to fairly evaluate them. Managers can also solicit feedback from a third-party reviewer who may have more specific experience of an employee's performance overall or in a particular area.

 

Gather Multi-Rater Feedback

Halogen eAppraisal provides an optional Multi-Rater module that allows a manager or HR representative to collect multi-rater 360 degree feedback on an employee as part of their performance appraisal process. Gathering multiple perspectives on performance can help eliminate subjectivity and give a broader more consistent evaluation of performance.

 

Use Consistent Language in Comments

Writing detailed comments on employee performance can be a challenge. Getting the words just right, and including a consistent level of detail and information takes time and skill. Halogen eAppraisal's Comment Helper gives managers suggestions for wording, which they can adjust or edit, improving the consistency and often the detail and quality of the feedback they provide. Feedback is less subjective and more uniformly descriptive.

 

Read How Others Have Improved the Consistency of their Employee Performance Appraisals

J.J. Findorff managers now see more value in the appraisal process and employees are more satisfied with the broader, more consistent feedback they are getting.

Their new automated employee performance appraisal system has completely organized Jelly Belly's employee review process. They've standardized competencies across job classifications, and employees have seen a huge improvement in the consistency and quality of the feedback they're receiving.

 

See for Yourself

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