Creating Evaluations That Work
By Jeremy Clopton
Many firms still use evaluations to look back and review the past 12 months. But a good evaluation needs to be more than a review of what happened.
It should help an employee understand what matters, where they stand, and what comes next. It’s a great opportunity to recognize strong performance, talk about development, and set goals for the coming year.
That sounds simple. In practice, evaluations can easily become a collection of ratings, comments, and required boxes that document the past without doing much to improve the future.
Creating an evaluation that improves behavior and fosters growth requires firms to think carefully about what they measure, who gets a voice in the process, whether the process feels fair, and what happens after the conversation ends.
Start With What the Firm Actually Values
Every evaluation sends a message about what matters.
Staff pay attention to what gets discussed, measured, rewarded, and eventually promoted. If an evaluation spends significant time on charge hours, realization, deadlines, and client responsiveness, those measures become signals about what the firm values.
That isn’t necessarily a problem. Firms are businesses, and productivity, profitability, and client service matter.
The problem comes when the evaluation doesn’t reflect everything the firm claims to value.
There’s some interesting research on this within the accounting profession.
A study published in the International Journal of Auditing examined how three different evaluation focuses were associated with future behavior: efficiency, client concerns, and audit quality. The researchers found that a client-focused evaluation was associated with greater dysfunctional behavior, while a quality-focused evaluation appeared capable of reducing it.
That doesn’t mean client service shouldn’t be emphasized. Of course it should. But the study illustrates a larger point: what firms emphasize can influence how professionals behave.
Another study, published in the Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance, looked specifically at the way performance evaluations are structured for auditors. The researchers noted that accounting evaluations have traditionally focused heavily on outcomes such as completing assigned tasks and meeting budgeted hours. In an experiment involving 118 experienced auditors, evaluations focusing on the underlying goals of the work, rather than simply task outcomes, produced better results, including greater professional skepticism and increased evidence gathering.
That’s worth thinking about.
If staff consistently hear that completing work within budget is important, they’ll naturally work to optimize the budget. If an evaluation also spends meaningful time discussing judgment, quality, coaching, learning, communication, collaboration, and developing others, those behaviors receive attention too.
Before adding another question or rating to an evaluation form, firms should probably ask a bigger question:
If people became exceptionally good at everything this evaluation rewards, but stayed stagnant at everything else, would that create the professionals and leaders the firm needs?
If the answer is no, the evaluation may be measuring the wrong things.
Give Employees a Role in the Process
Choosing the right measures is only part of creating an effective evaluation.
The process also needs good information, and the supervisor doesn’t have it all.
Each team member works with a wide range of people throughout the year. They may have coached staff through situations that were never formally documented, handled a difficult client interaction exceptionally well, recovered from a mistake, learned a new skill, or stepped into an informal leadership role that isn’t obvious from charge hours or engagement results.
That makes the employee’s perspective valuable.
Research supports giving employees a meaningful role in the evaluation process. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology reviewed 27 studies and found a strong relationship between employee participation in performance appraisals and positive reactions to the process.
One of the more interesting findings was that simply having an opportunity to express a perspective was more important than the desire to control the outcome. They benefited from having a voice in the process.
This is the difference between part of the process and participating. Employee participation doesn’t mean everyone gets to choose a rating or argue their way into a promotion. It means the evaluation isn’t something that simply happens to them.
Before the conversation, firms might ask employees to reflect on where they excel and struggle, what challenges stand in their way, or where they feel they overcame obstacles.
Those answers give leaders additional information while also asking employees to take greater ownership of their development.
And sometimes the most useful part is where those perspectives don’t match.
A manager may believe someone’s communication needs significant improvement while the employee sees communication as a strength. Or a manager may be pushing for a staff member’s promotion, while the employee feels overwhelmed by their current role or wants to move in a different direction entirely.
Those differences aren’t reasons to avoid employee participation. They’re exactly why the conversation is valuable.
Make the Process Feel Fair
Participation also connects to another important element of effective evaluations: perceived fairness.
A study of 2,377 employees examining performance appraisal fairness found that employee participation, knowledge of the appraisal process, and attitudes toward the supervisor were all positively associated with perceptions that the evaluation was fair.
Fair doesn’t mean every employee likes the rating.
It means people understand how the conclusion was reached.
That requires more than a well-designed form.
Employees should understand what they’re being evaluated on before the end of the year. Expectations should be reasonably consistent and well communicated. Ratings should be supported by examples rather than vague impressions. Feedback from multiple engagements or leaders should be considered when appropriate. And the employee should have an opportunity to add context or explain a different perspective.
Most importantly, a difficult evaluation shouldn’t contain information an employee had no reasonable way of knowing.
An employee can disagree with a conclusion and still believe the process was thoughtful and fair.
Build the Evaluation Backward
Perhaps the easiest way to improve an evaluation process is to stop beginning with the form.
Instead, start with the outcome.
What should employees understand when the evaluation is over and what growth do you want to see moving forward?
Ideally, they should know what the firm values, how they’re performing against those expectations, where they need to grow, and what they’re going to do next.
They should also feel that the evaluation considered the full picture, that their perspective was heard, and that the process was reasonably fair, even if they didn’t agree with every conclusion.
Then firms can work backward.
Measure what actually matters.
Gather perspectives from the people who have useful information.
Give employees a meaningful voice.
Use specific evidence.
Make expectations clear.
Identify a few meaningful next steps.
And continue the conversation after the evaluation meeting ends.
Done well, an evaluation isn’t simply a record of someone’s performance.
It’s a tool for shaping what the firm values, helping people understand where they stand, and giving them a clearer path toward where they can go next.
