Taking stock: employee evaluations can help employers and employees alike.

• Author: Ascierto, Jerry
• Position: PRACTICE MANAGEMENT

Employee evaluations can be extremely effective and motivating, benefiting your business as much as your employees. The keys to a successful payoff are clear communication of your business' goals and carefully and consistently charting employee growth.

For your business, evaluations offer a tool to help achieve your goals by optimizing staff performance and identifying your organization's strengths and weaknesses, one employee at a time. For your employees, evaluations can provide guidance on how best to perform their jobs and help define their career path.

"In my opinion, the No. 1 motivator for professionals is not money, but feedback," says James Gellas, human resources manager for the Beverly Hills office of CPA firm Rothstein, Kass & Company. "Evaluations can be cumbersome and time-consuming, but they're the best way to develop your staff and help them grow."

While employee evaluation processes and frequency vary depending on an individual business' needs, there are some common practices to follow.

CLARIFY EXPECTATIONS

You must first define expectations before you can determine whether or not they are being met. "A business has to ask itself: what is the behavior we want to reward? What are our objectives and how are we going to meet them?" says Mary Richardson, a human resources consultant with Herrerias and Associates, a Novato-based executive search firm.

Those expectations are communicated through job descriptions, which need to remain up to date. "Sometimes, employers don't keep job descriptions current or they're not representative of the nature of the job," says Rebecca Hastings, information center manager for the Society of Human Resource Management. "The more detailed and the more often job descriptions are updated, the better."

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For Elena Sweda-Neff, human resources manager with UHY Advisors in Los Angeles, aligning job expectations with performance evaluations presented challenges. Her firm had grown through acquisition, with five independent firms gradually becoming one. Each of UHY's 12 locations had its own evaluation process.

To develop a unified approach, UHY defined five categories for business success: knowledge capital; client service and engagement management; practice development; people management and professional leadership; and policy compliance.

"So now, everything in the evaluation process is tied to these five categories, beginning with job descriptions," Sweda-Neff says.

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