How can a manager evaluate employee performance objectively?

In my experience, evaluation of employees performance starts from day one. For one thing, an employee must first, have an understanding of expectations from him before he sets out to drive them. So, I will; 1. Have a session with the employee to see how much he understands the business goal 2. Define how his role contributes to achieving the overall business goal 3. Agree on milestones that will determine how he is trending along the line 4. List small tasks with timelines that needs to be done to reach the milestones 5. Anticipate challenges and how to mitigate them 6. Agree on who does what, when & how (I will take some task as a learning curve for him) 7. Agree on schedule of reviews -daily/weekly 8. Celebrate small wins along the way!

Assessing employee performance impartially is vital for equitable evaluations. Managers can do so by establishing explicit, measurable objectives, employing performance metrics, holding frequent discussions, obtaining comprehensive feedback, and assessing based on accomplishments rather than personal prejudices. This approach cultivates a transparent and just evaluation system.

Instead of just gathering and giving feedback, it's better to give advice. Feedback is often about how we feel about something someone did. It's not always helpful because it can be subjective. Advice is different. It gives people clear ideas on what to do next. It looks at the future, not the past. When we give advice, we help people think about what they can do better next time, not just what they did before. This way we can help others focus on growing and improving.

Feedback should be done through the empirical data and evidences that both employee and the evaluator can agree upon. Passing just judgements or in isolation comments will not help to uplift the performance and improve results. Giving constructive feedback is always about helping the employee to create insights how to improve the results through structured methods and consistent monitoring of the drivers and KPIs. So the feedback can be given for improvement as well as best results so the employee further motivated to improve the lacking results. Share your ways and approaches that successfully resolve problems to improve results. Use feedback as much as decision models & problem solving approaches as hints to improve performances drives.

One thing I have found helpful is to use the question and listening skill. Actually, more listening! Let employee appraise the current performance and identify what could be done better, and what management can do to support him. Acknowledge his pain-points and show a positive attitude that will spur him to go on. Acknowledge his strengths and agree on how to consolidate on them to take advantage of identified opportunities.

The most important things in Action plans are to creat the visibility of shared actions and link them with other responsible parties. So the shared goals action plans should be made as a team discussion with responsibility shared employees of the same goal. Then reinforce all dimensions of the sharing perspective and link them together to give more visibility and execution responsibility to individual employees for the action steps. Important to make these action steps as considering points at the evaluation for the ratings. Otherwise shared goals are either achieved by one employee’s effort and other employees just claim success for rating goals. Action plan monitoring is the best way to support employee to coach them for better results.

Automatic capturing the results in a system is the best way to avoid subjective rating and demotivating Employees. All the goals should be formulated with driver indicators, so that the goal results could be a sign automatically with a numerical percentage. Such automation of results helps to frequently review in a dashboard as well as rate them unbiasedly. Predetermined rating system for Each KPI would be very successful harmonizing of the PMS seamless implementation. As an example Rating law as 1 is equals to less than 80% achievement of a goal and its call fail to achieve. Rating 2 is partially achieved is less than 100% of the goal and rating three is 98% to 102% and anything 102 and more is Rating 4 and 5 also could be further define.

Setting goals are important and it’s also important to assign right weightage to the goal. You can use a quadrant with Horizontal Making from Low (1) to High (10) scale of Impact of the business and Vertical Marking of the same from Low (1) to High (10) of the Difficulty to achieve to position the grid in the quadrant as Four areas with Priority 1,2 and 3. High impact Vs Low difficulty and Low Impact and Low Difficulty as Priority 1, High Impact and high difficulty as Priority 2 and Low impact High difficulty as priority 3. Then we can map the goals in it and work with the employees sensibly to assign and weight the goals. That will give a seriousness and importance of their goals sequences and weightage for employee.