Gathering high-quality feedback and creating goals that benefit both your company and your employees help derive the most value from your performance review processes.

The quality of the performance review that you perform depends directly on the quality of the information that you gather about your staff’s performance. If you only source of information is from a single manager or supervisor who relies on their own opinion, it’s extremely unlikely that the feedback will be accurate or provide any sort of insight for the employee.

Some companies use number rankings and ratings that pit one employee against each other. While these systems appear to be more objective and transparent, the fact that ratings are provided from the top down limits the information that a company gathers about employees.

A method of rating that more companies continue to adopt is the multi-rater system, which creates in-depth information from the perspective of everybody involved in the business, including bosses, peers, customers and clients. Through feedback gathered from all angles, data is created about the impacts that an employee’s work has on the person rating them.

Ratings and opinions from multiple sources helps to eliminate the bias that occurs when a single person provides data for rankings. This gives HR professionals and business owners the opportunity to improve the performance of staff by possessing accurate and actionable information.

The reason that you’re collecting performance feedback about your employees revolves around attempting to improve the day-to-day functioning of your staff. One of the best ways to make use of the information gathered is to focus on creating goals that align the company’s mission with the employee’s performance.

Instead of giving simple feedback once a year, performance improvement should be a constant process that involves year-round coaching and feedback. This ensures that all members of the team stay focused on how their work affects the bottom line of the company. Rather than working to earn good ratings in an effort to keep their job, employees work to achieve goals that provide mutual benefit.

Investing in 360 review software will help you get the most of performance reviews in ways that you never thought possible. Knowing this, however, is just the first step; finding the right tool to use can be daunting.

Grapevine Evaluations has the solution you need: web-based, customizable templates that provide comprehensive reporting. Take a tour of our product, or learn more from us on a one-on-one demo, and find out why we’ve helped countless large and small companies gain a solid understanding of the value of their employees.