An employee evaluation is much more than a simple performance review, it’s a way of understanding how you are performing as a manager. Employee evaluation is important as it lets you understand how well matched an employee is to that specific task and if they are having difficulties. Although these are typically used to formally review work quality and output, they are also there to help you think about how motivated or supported staff are or how realistic the workload is. This information should help you improve your management and provide insights into things like employee training plans or highlight areas in need of shaking up.

Your employees are your company. If you don’t take care of them, you’ll end up with: 1) a failing company full of uninspired people, or 2) a vacant parking lot. Taking genuine care of people means identifying and unblocking their problems, celebrating their successes, and asking what they’d like to achieve in the future. Basically—having a meaningful conversation. When you turn this conversation into a clear, documented action plan, progress becomes easier to review. Employees and managers then commit to achieving goals together.

There is always the temptation to download an employee evaluation template in word or pdf and print it but there are a number of issues with this. Firstly, this information is extremely sensitive and having it on paper means it limits how you can share and store this information securely. Secondly, employee analysis can be tricky and having to scribble out written evaluations after you’ve reconsidered your score is a messy affair, keep it clean and go digital. Finally, while printable employee performance evaluation samples seem like a convenient option, they will cost you a lot of time in the future. You may need to review these evaluations in a year, and you don’t want to be searching for the key to the locked filing cabinet. The main benefit of using a digital or online evaluation form is the ease of access to information stored securely.

Writing a good and fair evaluation is important as a manager but it’s also useful to get feedback from the employee. Have them do a self-assessment and comparing this to your own analysis of their work, will let you see if you both align on what their professional development plan should be. You can use our performance review template to give you the basic structure but any good employee evaluation form should contain information about:

• The employee (name & job title)

• Their job description and objectives

• The quality of their work

• Their productivity

• Their communication skills

• How knowledgeable they are about their specialty

• How well they work with the team

• If they are meeting their goals

• Their achievements

• Areas to improve

Make sure the rating system is consistent throughout the form and is the same one you give to the employee, that way you can compare scores directly.