Survey Use for Employee Assessment Part 1

Most companies have interesting – and sometimes strange – procedures in place, especially when it comes to evaluating employees. For example, most companies as employees to fill out a personal evaluation before providing an actual evaluation.

But there are only two possible outcomes: Employees are accurate about their evaluation, so their input was not important. Employees are inaccurate about their evaluation, in which case their input is not important. Interestingly, most employees are going to try to be humble as well, because of concern that they will start an argument at the workplace.

If employees are not answering honestly, there is even less benefit to these evaluations. Yet another issue that often comes up is that employees are graded by a single person – a person that simply asks some others for input and then fills in the evaluation themselves. Rarely does an employee have one manager/supervisor that works with them regularly and can give insight into their true working habits, and so these evaluations are then biased by the one person’s beliefs.

This may be yet another opportunity to consider using a survey. With an online survey you can poll those that work with the individual directly on how they view the employee’s talents. From there, you can gather the information and create a document that has the averages of the person’s overall score, based on the recommendations by the managers that reviewed them.

This provides several benefits: Scores are weighted equally rather than being prone to a single person’s judgments. Differences in talent items can give supervisors something to look for about their own opinions to see how and why they differ (for example, if one supervisor gives a D and one gives an A, both can try to learn why the other views the person’s talents so differently and reflect accordingly). Those same ranges can be discussed with the employee so they know how they received the score that they did.

Grades can be monitored over time rather than taken all at once when the evaluation is due, to see if there are changes in opinion that may have occurred while the employee was working. Algorithms can be put in place to view whether or not the employee deserves a raise or should be monitored for a layoff. The way that businesses perform most employee evaluations is questionable, and in some ways troublesome.

Surveys can easily be used for a much more effective and efficient method of collecting data and evaluating current employees.