These are the five goals of an effective employee evaluation process.

The employee and the supervisor are clear about the employee’s goals, required outcomes or outputs, and how the success of the contributions will be assessed.

The goals of the best employee performance evaluations also include employee development and organizational improvement. The employee performance evaluation helps employees accomplish both personal development and organizational goals. The act of writing down the goals takes the employee one step closer to accomplishing them.

Since goals, deliverables and measurements are negotiated in an effective employee performance evaluation, the employee and the supervisor are committed to achieving them. The written personal development goals are a commitment from the organization to assist the employee to grow in his or her career.

Employee performance evaluation provides legal, ethical, and visible evidence that employees were actively involved in understanding the requirements of their jobs and their performance. The accompanying goal setting, performance feedback, and documentation ensure that employees understand their required outputs.

In the event that an employee is not succeeding or improving in his job performance, the performance evaluation documentation can be used to develop a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).

This plan provides more detailed goals with more frequent feedback to an employee who is struggling to perform. The goal is improvement but non-performance can lead to disciplinary action up to and including employment termination.

In many organizations, numeric rankings are used to compare an employee’s performance with the performance of other employees. Numeric ratings are frequent components of these systems, too.

No matter how fair and non-discriminatory, these ratings are made to appear through the endless establishment of criteria for rating, they basically boil down to the manager’s opinion of an employee’s performance. This is why I don’t particularly support numeric components in an employee performance evaluation process.

The employee performance evaluation provides evidence of non-discriminatory promotion, pay, and recognition processes. This is an important consideration in training managers to perform consistent, regular, non-discriminatory employee performance evaluations.

The documentation of success and failure to achieve goals is a critical component of the employee performance evaluation process.

While employee performance evaluation systems take many forms from organization to organization, these are the components that organizations are most likely to include. Some are more effective than others.