employees lined upAs you evaluate and tweak your employee performance management strategy, you may be forgetting one important thing: your employees.

Are you giving your employees a voice in how they’re evaluated? Are you allowing and encouraging them to play an active role in how they’re managed and coached, and how their careers are developed? Or are you simply taking the reins and providing top down assessments with no input on behalf of those who are being assessed?

If your approach falls into the second category, reconsider the effect this may be having on morale and individual initiative. And factor in the long term impact of these things on innovation, retention and the quality of your workplace culture.

Involving Employees in Performance Management and Assessments

Here are a few ways to bring your employees back into the employee performance management loop:

1. Before your managers complete their official evaluations, make sure all employees are given a chance (or are required) to complete a thorough and honest self-assessment. Give clear instructions beforehand, including carefully calibrated ratings for success across defined metrics. Avoid gathering employee evaluations and then handing them back for revisions with instructions like “You gave yourself a five out of five on this metric. Don’t do that. We don’t allow five-out-of-fives.”

2. To make the self-evaluation process more meaningful, encourage employees to keep journals throughout the year in which they document specific achievements, accomplishments, and challenges overcome.  These journals may become part of the dialogue during evaluation meetings. Employees may also want to archive the feedback they’re given on specific projects and efforts. See emPerform tag.

3. If your company makes use of a 360° review process, allow both employees and managers to nominate specific 360° reviewers. This can provide a sense of control over the process.

4. Allow employees to weigh in on rating calibration efforts. If possible, invite employee representatives to participate in calibration meetings between managers and HR.

5. Finally, an employee performance management strategy is only as good as the number of employees who use it properly. We see too many instances where once-a-year reviews create a disconnected workforce of under-coached employees. This type of system might work for some companies, but for most, revisiting goals and expectations once a year isn’t enough.  emPerform gives managers and employees the tools needed to participate in coaching, feedback, and goal management year-round.

As you revisit your employee performance management procedures and practices, don’t overlook the most important aspect – employees. There are many tools that can be enabled to get employees involved and excited about performance management. For more information, visit www.employee-performance.com