Subjective vs. Objective Evaluation Forms in Businesses

Employee performance reviews are useful both for the employer and the employee when used properly and under specific occasions. It’s a good chance for the supervisor to give constructive feedback to ensure their business is operating in the best possible way. In the following report we are going to present a sample of a full Employee Performance Review which was downloaded from the web and it is used in numerous companies in order to be completed by the supervisors through the evaluation process.

            Management and HR experts have been debating for years the most effective way to access and evaluate employee performance. In today’s highly competitive market employers tend to rely on a mix of subjective and objective measures as part of a larger performance measurement process. Employers are trying through the performance evaluation process to give praise for a job well done , guidance for what an employee may be doing wrong and have open discussions about the future of the company and the potential for employee growth. Although , the performance evaluations system can be misleading and dysfunctional when it comes to some kind of jobs that cannot be easily measured or to skills and characteristics of an employee that can be evaluated only in a subjective way by the employer.

          There are several types of performance evaluations used by management experts in order to review employees’ performances, recognize their achievements and objectively identify areas where improvement is needed. The first of the Performance Evaluation types is the “360-Degree Appraisal” , which is a system in which employees receive confidential and anonymous feedback from their subordinates, peers, supervisors, customers and even vendors sometimes. The more information is collected, the more accurate the performance review becomes. Although this type of evaluation seems to be laborious and time-consuming, it is often chosen by many employers due to its multi-dimensional vantage point it creates and the comprehensive feedback on the employee’s performance to firm in-depth insights it provides. It can also be combined with the Paired Comparison system, in which an employee is compared with every other employee in the working group. These type of evaluations are reliable because they give multiple outcomes which can be crosschecked through the collection of many critics among the employees and they ae based on a systematic method of comparison and evaluation.

           Another performance evaluation type if the Rating Scale Method that offers a high degree of structure for appraisals. Due to its simplicity it is one of the most widely used systems around the companies of the globe and tends to give highly useful outcomes to the supervisors due to the way it’s constructed. Each employee trait or characteristic is rated on a bipolar scale that usually has several points raging from “Excellent” to “Poor” or some similar arrangement. One other similar version of this performance evaluation type is the Numerical Rating Scale which has the same philosophy. It commonly involves rating individuals on a (1 to 5) or a (1 to 10) scale with lower numbers to describe unsatisfactory performance, the intermediate numbers the adequate performance and the higher ones the excellent performance. Though these two methods are widely used in companies, there is a drawback when it comes on the evaluation by different supervisors. In this case, this method can be misleading and inaccurate, because there is no fair comparison between two workers who have been evaluated by different people who have different point of view and criteria when evaluating an employee. This happens because every score an employee achieves in this type of evaluation has a direct relationship with the subjectivity of the supervisor’s evaluation.

            One other tool is the Management by Objectives, a personnel management technique where managers and employees co-operate to set, record and monitor goals for a specific period of time. This type of evaluation is often characterized as a clear cut way to track progress. In an objective- based evaluation system, the employer and the employee will agree upon a specific goal for the employee to meet coupled with a deadline. If the employee meets the objective , then it speaks highly of them an vice versa. This kind of evaluation system provides direct and objective results for the quality of work, the consistency, the skills and the effectiveness of an employee’s effort, though it seems not to distinguish the high performing workers from the average ones, but only the ones who meet their goals on time and successfully from the ones who don’t manage to do it through the specific timeline set by the manager. This can be called a disadvantage because it cannot be the exclusive tool that a manager will use when it comes to the evaluation of several employees in order to pick the ones with the highest performance to award with a promotion or a salary raise.

            In addition, psychological appraisals are one of the modern types of evaluation an employee. This type of evaluation assesses the employee’s intellectual ability , emotional stability , analytical skills and other psychological traits using objective psychological evaluation processes. This type of evaluation is used more and more in the modern markets in which supervisors and HR experts focus more on their worker’s mental characteristics, skills and habits so they can have a clear image on the performance and the quality of work an employee can provide considering this type of characteristics in order to determine if he is capable and efficient for a certain job environment. Although, its drawback is that it’s maybe the most subjective part of a worker’s evaluation because this type of evaluating is highly subjective and its outcomes are strictly linked also to the personal point of view and judge of the supervisor.

       To sum up and considering all the above categories included in the Performance Evaluation Form that I am suggesting to be adopted in the organization, I came up in the conclusion that this kind of an evaluation seems to be effective for the right and fair evaluation of all the employees just because it combines data from all the categories above. Although the form contains both objective and subjective criteria of evaluating a worker’s performance in a workplace, I believe that every part of it gives data that are necessary in order to decide whether an employee is high performing and deserves to be awarded or not. This makes the form fully comprehensive and a totally useful tool in the hands of a supervisor who wants to establish an ideal Performance Appraisals System as a base for pay in his company. The companies of the modern societies and markets cannot keep on growing using bases for pay such as the Seniority and Merit Bay Systems in which the only factor of awarding an employee is the time he has been working in a certain workplace for instance. These ways of compensation are old fashioned, unfair and slow up both the evolution of the company and the employees. Although, the healthy balance of positive and negative feedback about an employee’s work , which is found through the usage of the performance evaluation forms will help each and every team member to evolve in their roles through the effective performance review and as a result , the employers will manage to be fair with the evaluation of all the employees and the company will maximize its outputs in the first hand , and afterwards its general profits. So I’m strictly recommending the adoption of the certain Performance Evaluation Form for our organization.

Marinela Lekka

International Marketing & Communications Associate