Improving your employee feedback process
The five stages of the evaluation cycle
Probably the most painful part of any evaluation cycle is getting people to complete their feedback.
Enjoyment. You're ready and prepared for this review cycle. You've set it up through your system of choice and you're prepared to exceed tweaking questions and get right down to sending it out to your company.
Sympathy. Naturally, not lots of people have actually done their evaluations yet. You understand that people don't have time write an essay on their colleagues and/or direct reports and/or managers that a 360-degree evaluation needs. Or possibly they're entering, responding to a few questions, but need to reread it a few times before sending. That's right. Individuals are doing it, they're probably simply not sending it yet.
Courteous aggravation. Okay, you understand it's that very hectic time at the end of the year, but getting down to the wire now. Also, if you run more than one evaluation cycle a year, you know that, in some way, whenever you run an evaluation cycle is immediately the busiest time of the year. This evaluation cycle becomes part of the work.
Now that we've checked out the worst-case scenario, remember this: the typical participation rates for feedback are 60% -80%, with 80%+ being very high.
Particularly if individuals are on leave, or are being reviewed throughout busy quarters, there are many reasons it's hard to get to 100%, and it's quite uncommon for most businesses. Offer yourself credit for the amount of work your doing, and remember to have sensible expectations, both for you and your HR group and for your employees doing the evaluation.
Everybody will be better if you don't struggle over trying to get to precisely 100%.
Rather, based on our conversations with customers, we discovered five best practices that can easily enhance your feedback process participation rates-- without anxiety for you or your customers.
How to improve your evaluation cycle's participation rates
- Before the evaluation, set a schedule. When you set an evaluation schedule and communicate due dates, people take the process a lot more seriously. While you most likely have a due date for when you want all your reviews in, breaking down that time into portions for particular parts of the evaluation can help keep everyone on track. This strategy to improve employee engagement is especially important for 360-degree evaluations because certain people (like managers) will have more work to do than others-- and they'll likely have the least amount of time to do them. When building the schedule, work with them to make certain the number of evaluations required by them is reasonable in the time provided.
- Secure executive buy-in. It's crucial that leadership at your business is lined up on the importance of your review and encourages the business to assign time to write their evaluations. We really recommend obstructing out a couple of hours as a business on a Friday afternoon if possible to work on this.
- Train employees on the process. Employee feedback can be a drag due to the fact that employees often feel overwhelmed by them-- both in terms of just how much work they require, but likewise because, without proper communication from the business, they do not completely understand their function. Without appropriate preparation, staff members can feel that employee feedbacks are a penalty rather than a job that can assist them as much as the company. Describe to employees exactly why your business is holding an evaluation, walk them through the process, and reveal them how to use the tools.
- Have truly clear expectations on what you want from reviewers. On that note, when you train workers on how to write reviews, provide people examples, top suggestions, or an FAQ. That means having actually clear expectations on what you want from them in this review cycle. How lots of sentences long should each response be? How far back should they go when listing achievements? What do they want their managers and/or peers and/or direct reports to leave their review?
- Utilize a variety of pointers. While it is the most basic location to do it, it's insufficient to remind people to complete their evaluations in internal messaging systems like Slack. It can also feel like nagging (from both your and your staff members' side) when you rely too difficult on that one medium. Instead, spread out the pressure apart-- encourage managers to discuss it in 1:1 s, announce it at business meetings, and send out e-mail suggestions. People are busy, but specifically, when you have other individuals (such as managers and management) motivate them, they will get it done.
- Rally the team. Teams love goals and they like progress updates. Produce a team-wide OKR to get 100% completion rates, motivate individuals to upgrade each other frequently on their individual progress, and lastly, make each part of the employee feedback a synergy.
- Use employee pulse survey. These pulse surveys will help make the employee feedback process seamless.
For instance, when you have a couple of weeks committed entirely to self-reviews, motivate individuals to share ideas on how best to approach the process.
This will help improving employee morale
How do you do feedback management?
Focus groups are routine, scheduled discussions where staff members and managers talk freely about how the staff member is doing. These conversations can be an excellent way for both managers and staff members to discuss what is and isn't working for them in the partnership.
Keep track of feedback and appreciation.
Using a feedback system assists you track feedback not just from the manager, but from colleagues. Which can include public praise, which indicates wins that are commemorated with the entire business.
Provide clear expectations with objectives
Staff members want to grow, but they require to know in what direction-- and objectives are perfect for pointing the method.
Our last suggestion: get an employee engagement software application.
It'll make employee feedback easier than ever-- for your company, your team, and yourself.
It will also help you reduce the cost of employee turnover. And as you know from our article on how to calculate the cost of turnover, it can get quite expensive.
There's a lot that an employee feedback system like Sparkbay can do to make your employee feedback procedure much easier.
An employee feedback system:
- puts everything in one location
- keeps records of previous years
- combines a system of record for all feedback management metrics
- updates you on how far in the review cycle everybody is
An employee feedback system like Sparkbay has the added benefits of:
- instantly saving your drafts of reviews before you submit them (say goodbye to of that sneaking fear that the evaluation you worked hours on has actually vanished in a puff of smoke).
- measuring company-wide engagement, which it can map against performance.
- offering records for external feedback.
- including traditional and/or project-based evaluations.
- and being intuitive to use, for both the admin and the employee.
In Conclusion
Remember, you're doing it for the advantage of your business and staff members.
In this article, we help HR managers get ready for employee feedbacks and prepare managers and employees for employee feedbacks. But there's another element of preparation that can make a huge distinction for year-end employee feedbacks: feedback management.
Feedback management consists of giving feedback and praise, holding routine 1:1 s between managers and their direct reports, and talking about goals over the course of the year. It's a series of conversations that resemble the employee feedback-- but without all the things that make individuals worried about employee feedbacks: the pressure, stress, and anxiety, or attempting to depend on their own bad memory.
Strengthening your company's feedback management is our primary recommendation for getting ready for your year-end review.
Interested in learning how technology can help you increase employee engagement? Learn more about our people analytics and employee engagement software.
