An employee evaluation isn’t a job interview. You aren’t trying to analyze an employee’s psyche to determine whether or not they are capable of doing the job. You (hopefully) already know this.

You are trying to specifically determine how they can contribute more to the company. Here is a great example of a question you should ask instead, as shown in a Career Intel blog post: “In which area(s) would you like to improve?”

The purpose of employee evaluations are to determine how both the organization and your employee can better synchronize to achieve your goals.

While you should address what people like and dislike about the company, the questions should be specific enough to address elements that help and hinder performance. “What do you like best?” is too vague for this, because the response could be anything, including something irrelevant to your original objective.

There are a couple of things wrong with this question. Firstly, yes or no questions have no place on employee evaluations. The responses won’t be of any benefit to anybody.

Never discuss personality traits in an employee review. People will usually talk about themselves in positive terms in response to this question. When team members respond to the same question, there could be negative responses.

This creates an unnecessarily hostile environment. Instead of personality traits, ask questions that address specific behaviors.

Direct comparisons between team members in employee evaluations creates a hostile and unhealthy competitive environment. This is extremely dangerous, as it can lead employees to resort to subterfuge in order to get ahead.

If you feel the need to compare employees to anything, only pit them against performance standards, not other people.

Make sure that your employee evaluations address the performance of both employees and the company, that they are completely clear, and that they don’t offend people.

The goal of an effective 360 degree feedback is to prevent these questions from ever being asked. If your company is currently struggling with employee evaluations, contact us today to learn how Grapevine Evaluations can help!