Types of Employee Performance Evaluation

Today, there are many innovative and useful methods which are used by corporates. Read further to know about some of the most popular ones.

As the name suggests, in this method, it is the direct supervisor of the employee who prepares the performance review. The direct supervisor is the perfect person to evaluate an employee as he has constantly observed how the employee has fared in his job, throughout the year.

If the employee has any questions with regards to how he was evaluated, how was his performance and how he can improve on it, all such questions can be easily answered by the supervisor as he has seen the employee doing his job every day.

Some organizations which follow the "top-down" method, may have a member of the human resources team present, along with the supervisor or manager, during the employee evaluation.

This method takes a lot of time as a supervisor provides a comprehensive feedback on the employee's performance by writing and narrating small essays on his strengths, weaknesses, areas of expertise, areas of improvement, etc. Although time-consuming, the main advantage is that it leads to open communication between the manager and the employee.

In this method, an employee's individual goals are aligned to that of the organization. In the beginning of the year itself, the employee works in conjunction with his manager and the various criteria on which his performance will be reviewed are determined. Then periodically, the employee is assessed on the basis of how well he is working towards his goals.

Under this method, employees are given self-performance evaluation forms and they rate themselves on various criteria. Their manager too rates and reviews their performance. During the final evaluation, both the employee and the manager compare notes on how they have conducted the evaluation.

Ideally, the assessments should be very similar, provided the employee has been fair in evaluating himself. If the assessments are totally different, the employee should take appropriate feedback from the manager, as to which areas he needs to work upon, how to improve his performance, etc.

This is the most popular method. In this method, the human resources department takes inputs and opinions about the employee's performance from everyone working with him, right from his subordinates to coworkers to supervisors and managers. Each of these people rates and scores the employee, in accordance to their observations about him.

All these professionals are able to give a fair assessment as their inputs are kept anonymous. In the end, it is a member of the human resource department itself who aggregates all the scores and finally evaluates the employee.

Although, this method of evaluation is not very popular, yet, it is followed in some companies under specific circumstances. In this system, it is the fellow coworkers of the employee who review and rate him.

The logic behind choosing this evaluation method is that only the coworkers who are doing the same job as the employee, would be able to understand the challenges and problems he faces every day and thus, would be able to evaluate him fairly.

On the flip side, if there is competition amongst the employees, there are chances that the coworkers might review each other harshly. This evaluation method is generally followed when the manager is new on the job and still does not understand the work of the employees completely.

This method is used in organizations which are production-based. In such businesses, productivity is usually measured in terms of quantity. One advantage of this method is that the rating and comparison of the employees can be standardized and hence, there is little room for partiality.

This method works well in organizations in which there is more than one manager handling a team of employees. Under the matrix system, the employee is evaluated on different criteria by different managers. The employee is given separate scores in various categories by all the managers.

Thereafter, these scores are averaged and then the final score in each category is arrived at. Matrix system is the best for organizations in which employees move from one team to another within a year or report to different managers as they are working on multiple projects.

A corporate may choose any of these methods, depending upon its requirement. The purpose behind these evaluations is to assess the employees, identify their areas of weakness and help them improve in their job. Overall, evaluations should be a positive process, with no negativity, as they are meant to help an employee grow and not to undermine his work.