How to Evaluate Employees

Where to Start

Now that you know how to create and edit job descriptions, you’ll be relieved to know that the process of evaluating an employee is very similar.  What you’re going to do is create an employee evaluation, which is similar to a job description file except that its name ends in “tip-v” (v for evaluation) and its icon is green:

Creating an Employee Evaluation

Because we insist on no evaluation without description, you can’t create an employee evaluation from scratch.  You have to have either a job description or another evaluation of an employee in the same or a similar job.

But once you create an evaluation, you can change anything in it, including the job description that it’s based on.  So let’s get started.

Start up TIP and choose:

In the main menu, tell TIP what you want to start from:

Your choices are:

From Existing Job Description – Use a job description that you already have on hand.  This is the most common way of doing it.

From Existing Employee Evaluation – Use an evaluation of another employee (such as another person who has held the same job).  TIP will use the job description from that evaluation, but will ignore the information in it that identifies the employee.

From Same Employee’s Earlier Evaluation – Use this choice when you’re evaluating an employee whom you have previously evaluated, in an earlier year, for the same job.  The identifying information will be copied from the earlier evaluation, but the scores will be reset.

What an Evaluation Looks Like

In this example we’ll create an evaluation for a position called Information Technology Analyst. We've previously created a full job description for this position. When the evaluation is open on the screen, here’s what it looks like:
 

Here are some things to notice:

*      The tree structure on the left, and much of the rest of the screen, is the same as for a job description.

*      Teal-blue panels contain additional items: the employee’s identifying information at the top, and the score at the bottom.

*      There are two text areas for comments at the bottom.

*      Part of the tree structure is in bright blue.  These are the items that need to be scored.

*      There are BACK and NEXT buttons at the lower right, to help you step through the tree quickly.

Identifying the Employee

Here’s the panel where you enter information to identify the employee:

The first box is, of course, the employee’s name.  For “ID#” most organizations use the Social Security Number.

The TODAY button will automatically fill in today’s date in the Date box.

The blank area to the right of “OVERALL SCORE:” is where the calculated score will appear when you’ve evaluated everything that needs scoring.

How to Assign Scores

You don’t have to assign an employee a score on everything – only on the items which, in the job description, have percentage weights.   Those are the ones that are blue in the tree.  Choose one of them, and you can use the drop-down box for assigning a score at the bottom of the screen:

Unless your personnel handbook specifies differently, here’s how the scores are interpreted:

Unsuccessful – Severely below minimum standards.

Needs improvement – Below the expected standard, but within reach of it. Problems can be identified and worked on.

Successful – Doing what the job calls for.  This is the most common score in a successful organization.

Outstanding – Doing much better than the job requires.  This score is uncommon and suggests that the employee should be promoted or given more responsibility.

Notice that No score assigned is one of the choices.  Even if you’ve scored an item, you can go back and remove the score if you decide to.

The Evaluation Process, Step by Step

So here’s how you’ll evaluate an employee:

(1)  Create a new evaluation.

(2)  Fill in the identifying information (employee’s name, etc.).

(3)  Go through the whole job description and score every item that needs it.  It’s a good idea to read every item, even the non-scoreable items; you may want to record comments, or change the comments that are already there.

You can edit any part of the job description as you work through it.  This is a good way to keep each employee’s job description up to date.

(4)  Look at the overall score, which is like a college grade-point average: 4.0 for Outstanding, 3.0 for Successful, and so forth, with the items weighted according to the percentages in the job description.

Plans and Goals

You’ll notice that in every employee evaluation, the tree contains an item called Plans and Goals that was not in the job description.  It’s added automatically.

This is the place for the evaluator and the employee to make some notes about goals for the coming year (or period).

Performance Improvement Plans

When you assign a score of 2 (Needs Improvement) or 1 (Unsuccessful) on any item, a window will pop up asking you what’s going to be done about it.  (Remember, the goal of performance management is to solve problems, not just tell people they’re doing badly.)  Here’s what you’ll see:

Please do your best to type something useful here.

When you do, the tree will acquire an item called Performance Improvement Plan and this will become an item under it.  And the item to which you assigned the low score will turn purple.  Here’s what the tree might look like:

The bracketed number [2] on the red item is the score.  In a real employee evaluation, all the items that you’ve scored will have bracketed numbers.

Here purple denotes items with low scores, and green is for the Performance Improvement Plan.

Recording Comments

Remember Interview Questions?  They’re not normally shown in an employee evaluation (though you can choose to show them, by right-clicking on the items in the tree).

But instead of Interview Questions, you will normally see two more text areas that exists only in employee evaluations.  They are called Comments and Confidential Comments.

Ordinary comments are included in the printed report, when you create one; confidential comments are not.

The idea is that you can evaluate an employee throughout the year.  That is, at the beginning of the year, you can go ahead and create the evaluation and start putting information into it – especially notes about unusual successes or problems.  Then, at the end of the year, you will go through all of this and assign scores.

This is where you will commonly use the “Insert Date and Time” choice that you get when you right-click in the text area.  You can actually use it in any text area, but this is where it’s useful.