Creating Your Performance Evaluation Form

• When creating your employee evaluation form, choose categories and skills that are necessary for employees to succeed in your business. Do not evaluate your employees on skills they do not use in their job on a regular basis.
  
  When creating your evaluation form, look at the tasks your employees do on a daily basis. It's a good idea to form a task force to help you create your evaluation categories and skills. This way the employees have input into the skills and categories they will be evaluated during their reviews.
  
  

Don't Only Point Out Problems

• When writing an employee's performance evaluation, don't just point out the problems with the employee's work. Keep in mind if there was a problem with everything your employee did, chances are he would not still be with your company. You would have terminated her employment before this. Mention positive things your employee has done in his performance evaluation. Use specific items. Don't just say "he is reliable." Instead, replace this with a statement such as "He has not been tardy one day this year, and he hits all his project deadlines." These specifics will help the employee know what he does well, and also what he needs to improve on.
  
  

Develop Goals For The Next Review Period

• An employee performance evaluation should not just be a summary of past performance. Instead, it should be look to the future and how the employee can improve her performance during that review period as well. This can be done by setting goals for the next review period. You can also include a section of classes that you would like for your employee to attend before his next performance evaluation. This allows you to emphasize the skills that are important for her success in the company, and also give her a way to improve her skills in those areas. This reduces the opportunity for an employee misunderstanding your comments on how to improve for the upcoming performance evaluation period.