Incredibly, only 8 percent of these companies report that their performance management creates significant value. The majority of these companies make one of many mistakes that cause employee reviews to be a meaningless waste of time.

The process of providing feedback for evaluations represents one of the biggest wastes of time in the creation of employee reviews. Deloitte’s survey revealed that about two million hours were spent per year in the creation of feedback ratings – not including data processing, analysis and employee-manager meetings.

Instead of spending time dealing with software systems, companies have the choice of outsourcing the collection and processing of employee ratings. This allows HR managers and business owners to spend more time working with employees to improve performance.

In the case where evaluations duties are performed only by managers or supervisors, bias tends to creep into evaluations because of their unique point of view. When collecting ratings from everybody involved in the business, including peers, managers and customers, the feedback that you receive includes a wider point of view, eliminating much of the bias that skews results.

A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology calculates that 62% of variance in employee ratings is caused by individual differences in perception, while the performance of the employee accounted for 21% of the variance. As a result, the authors of the study – Steven Scullen, Michael Mount and Maynard Goff – show that “most of what is being measured by the ratings is the unique rating tendencies of the rater. Thus ratings reveal more about the rater than they do about the ratee.”

While it’s impossible to completely eliminate human bias from any subjective rating process, obtaining opinions and feedback from as many people as possible helps balance the results and fill in managerial gaps of perception.

Reducing the time that it takes to collect feedback and increasing the value of the information derived from the feedback process helps to make the most of employee reviews.

If you want to make your employee reviews more meaningful, you should consider implementing 360 degree appraisals. At Grapevine Evaluations, our survey tool assists you in creating, distributing, managing, and evaluating all stages of the review process, easily and efficiently.

Let us walk you through our simple, customizable product, or take a tour on your own, and learn about updating your employee review process so that you can keep your best employees, and provide incentive to the whole team to excel.