Employee Assessments: 10 Essential Techniques

What is the determining factor of a company’s success? Is it capital, access to new markets, or marketing? The answer is pretty simple: it is the company’s Employees.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that an increase in hourly compensation mainly drives increases in labor productivity. While salaries are an important motivating factor in enhancing productivity, individual employee features are vital to creating high-performing teams.

Make employee evaluations an ongoing process that assesses performance and the ability to meet set objectives. Discover ten essential techniques for employee assessments and how you can use them to elevate your company’s performance.

The 360-degree feedback technique is one of the best assessment tools to evaluate an employee’s performance. The tool is useful for leadership testing because it does a skill assessment based on gathering information from individuals who have worked with the employee.

The main pros of using the 360-degree feedback assessment tool include:

• Providing a holistic view of a candidate
• Gathering feedback from stakeholders such as subordinates, peers, and managers
• Employers understand an employee’s impact across the entire organization
• Useful for identifying strengths and areas of improvement

The primary con of this technique is that it can be time-consuming. For instance, you’ll need to allocate at least two or three weeks to each stakeholder once you send the assessment request to get feedback. It’s important to consider that personal biases may affect the feedback’s validity.

The proper implementation of the 360-degree feedback assessment tool needs anonymity. Doing so is important for gathering honest feedback from the key stakeholders. The 360-degree feedback tool is effective for assessing current employees looking for leadership positions and as a pre-employment assessment.

Behavioral assessment is ideal for evaluating employee traits and behaviors that might affect work performance. The method is one of the most effective evaluation tools because it involves assessing how an employee handled previous work situations or challenges.

One common technique under behavioral techniques is asking an employee to give specific instances of how they handled certain roles, responsibilities, or challenges. Some of the pros of using behavioral interviews include:

• Acting as a predictor of future behavior
• Gathering insights on work ethic and leadership attitude
• Enhancing collaborative team development

Behavioral interviews allow you to understand how to communicate with and motivate your employees. According to IBM, the work environment is one of the main contributory factors to employee productivity.

Behavioral interviews are not ideal for assessing employees transitioning to a different work environment. This technique doesn’t account for situational behavior changes. For instance, how employees behave in an office environment may not predict their behavior in a remote environment.

Besides, there is a risk of stereotyping employees based on their past. It’s vital that organizations carefully assess the results of behavioral interviews, as misinterpretation can lead to poor hiring choices that may adversely affect the work environment.

The DISC assessment tool encompasses evaluating employees based on four personality types. These include:

One of the best staff appraisal strategies is the skill assessment technique. Under this method, you assess an employee’s skills against those needed for a particular role. Skills assessment is useful for identifying technical and soft skills required in your work environment.

The main pros of this technique are:

• Providing evidence of employee’s competencies relevant to their role
• Helping to identify gaps that training can address
• Eliminating bias through standardization

On the other hand, administering skills assessment is a resource-intensive endeavor. Assessing other unique skills, such as interpersonal competencies needed for certain job roles, may also be difficult.

Employee assessments can also be self-administered to encourage your workers to introspect. As one of the most effective performance evaluation methods, self-assessment is ideal for remote workers because it facilitates better self-awareness.

Additionally, by engaging in self-assessment, your workers become more accountable. You need to provide feedback after your workers complete a self-assessment. Doing so is key to highlighting discrepancies between external assessment and self-perception.

Self-assessment may be challenging due to personal biases. It may not also capture the whole view of performance, especially in large organizational workspaces.

According to McKinsey & Company, more than 50% of all workers are unproductive. Most companies are unaware of such workers because skill-based assessment techniques do not adequately capture attitudes.

An attitude assessment tool is one of the most robust employee evaluation techniques. This technique helps you understand how your employees think and their approach to team relationships and work challenges.

The pros of an attitude assessment include the following:

• Providing insights on how employees perceive collaboration and conflict resolution
• Enhancing decision-making when assessing employees for new roles
• Generating details on how you can improve employee morale

You can use different types of attitude assessment tools to finetune employee evaluation. One of the most common is an Emotional Intelligence (EQ) test. An EQ assessment helps you understand how your workers manage and understand emotions.

Get a sense of your employee’s performance by conducting anonymous peer reviews. This technique is ideal for understanding interpersonal relationships in the workplace.

According to the National Library of Medicine, employees are the greatest asset for improving an organization’s performance. Conducting peer reviews helps you see your worker’s attitude, work ethic, and performance from the perspective of their colleagues.

Peer reviews have to be anonymously administered to avoid any conflict. Although bases may affect the validity of peer reviews, you can use this to build stronger relationships between employees who don’t see eye-to-eye.

A Gallup poll found that disengaged employees cost companies about $1.9 trillion annually in lost productivity. Pre-employment assessments are necessary for weeding out workers who aren’t ready to work for you.

Pre-employment assessment techniques focus on identifying prospective employees are ideal based on the following:

• Personality
• Acquired skills and competencies
• Cultural fitness

Conducting a pre-employment assessment can assist you attract and retain the right talent. It allows you to motivate new hires and prepare them for their new role. The evaluation will also serve as a foundation for ongoing assessment techniques.

A Management by Objectives (MBO) technique is a collaborative evaluation process between you and your workers that begins by setting goals. The evaluation focuses on the employee’s ability to achieve goals and objectives.

The tool is useful for continuous evaluation because it addresses short-term and long-term goals. Other pros of this method include:

• Aligning individual workers with organizational objectives
• Setting clear expectations for each role
• Enhancing the relationship between you and your workers

Employee assessments also include performance appraisal ratings, which evaluate a worker’s performance against key performance indicators. This is one of the most widely used performance evaluation methods because it is easy to develop and customize.

Performance appraisals should occur periodically, such as after three or six months. The technique is ideal for identifying strengths and weaknesses early on. It also allows you to give your employees feedback on how they can adjust their performance.

The best practices for creating robust employee assessment techniques include the following:

• Using more than one assessment method
• Providing your employees with clear instructions
• Creating a conducive assessment environment
• Adopting valid and reliable assessment techniques by incorporating new tools

Customize the evaluation technique to your work environment. For instance, specific assessments may not be ideal for remote work environments where tracking employee performance is much more difficult. Further, make safety testing and assessment a core part of your evaluation if your work involves hazardous materials.

Understanding what motivates or drives your workers is the key to improving productivity. Employee assessments allow you to transform your organization by leveraging its main asset, the workers.

Success Performance Solutions provides various assessment and testing techniques to improve human resource management. From pre-employment assessment to leadership and skill assessment, our solutions focus on finding the right talent and optimizing the performance of your current workers.

Contact us today, and let us streamline your employee evaluation processes.