An employee assessment measures the aptitude, skills, and performance of your workforce, providing valuable insight into an individual’s performance and potential within your company. Beyond simply evaluating job roles and responsibilities, it also measures personality and behavioral traits, such as leadership potential, teamwork, and communication skills.
Small businesses can use an employee assessment to identify individual strengths and development needs, including areas where additional training or support may be needed. You can also gauge cultural fit and provide resources to help your employees thrive in their roles. This process not only benefits the employer but also empowers employees to understand their own potential and align themselves with roles that best match their skills and aspirations.
Types of Employee Assessments
Implementing varied assessment strategies can lead to more accurate insights into employee capabilities and enhance overall company effectiveness. Click through the tabs to learn the different types of employee assessments you can use to evaluate your employees.
A performance assessment measures specific skills and competencies directly related to an employee’s job role. This approach provides a comprehensive understanding of an individual’s strengths and areas for development, allowing for targeted improvement plans.
While traditional methods focus only on annual reviews, a more effective approach involves ongoing feedback and discussions throughout the year. This allows for real-time adjustments and development opportunities, rather than waiting until the end of the year to address performance issues. We recommend having key performance indicators (KPIs), which measure performance based on a set criteria.
A personality assessment, such as DISC or Myers-Briggs, measures the behavioral character traits of employees and the potential for how they will get along with others in your company. These assessments help explain what causes people to communicate or behave in certain ways. By understanding the unique characteristics of your employees, you can tailor their roles and responsibilities to match their strengths. This helps highlight overall people management skills desirable for your company.
Using personality assessments during the hiring process can help identify candidates who are well-suited for specific roles. Additionally, understanding how each individual operates within a team environment enables you to create a balanced and diverse team that complements each others’ strengths and weaknesses—leading to improved collaboration and innovation.
An aptitude assessment measures an individual’s problem-solving skills, critical thinking abilities, and overall knowledge. These employee assessment tests can be used at the hiring stage to determine if a candidate possesses the skills to perform the job responsibilities, or it could be used to promote employees to higher positions.
Aptitude assessments can provide a holistic view of employees beyond their technical abilities. They allow employers to identify hidden talents and potential that may not be immediately apparent from a resume or an interview. Additionally, by understanding an individual’s aptitude, supervisors can better assign tasks according to each person’s strengths, leading to a more efficient and effective team.
Soft skills assessments focus on non-technical skills and personal attributes of the individual. These are innate skills that are not learned through education. These include:
- Communication
- Active listening
- Empathy
- Conflict resolution
- Negotiation skills
- Time management
- Organizational skills
- Teamwork
- Collaboration
- Relationship Building
Soft skills are just one of twelve types of employee training to enhance workforce skills. The information gleaned from soft skills assessments provides managers with a clear roadmap for optimizing job role assignments and training programs to align with each individual’s unique abilities.
Goal progress assessments measure an individual’s journey towards achieving their objectives. These assessments track milestones achieved, identify obstacles, and allow you to adjust strategies as necessary. By regularly assessing goal progress, you can ensure your employees stay focused, motivated, and accountable for their actions.
Start by breaking down long-term goals into smaller, measurable milestones that can be regularly evaluated. By setting clear, specific targets and deadlines, you can easily track your employees’ progress and make necessary adjustments so they stay on course. Taking a proactive approach allows your employees to address any challenges head-on and develop strategies for overcoming them.
Impact assessments go beyond simply evaluating performance metrics but delve into the broader influence of team dynamics, company culture, and customer relationships on your employees. These assessments promote transparency in communication between managers and employees by providing a platform for open dialogue about strengths, weaknesses, and career aspirations.
Conducting these assessments involves gathering feedback through surveys, interviews, and data analysis to understand how different aspects of the work environment are affecting your employees. Additionally, these assessments help create a more stable and supportive work environment that prioritizes employee satisfaction and success.
Methods to Conduct Employee Assessments (With Examples)
When it comes to conducting your employee assessments, there are a few methods that work best to give you the information needed to make informed decisions, whether it be who to hire, who to promote, or who needs to be on an improvement plan.
360-Degree Feedback
Using a 360-degree feedback approach is a way to get a more holistic view of your employees’ performance in relation to everyone they work with. This type of assessment not only gathers feedback from your employee’s direct supervisor, but also from peers, direct reports, and customers (where applicable), allowing employers and employees to view how they are performing from all angles, not just based on performance metrics.
A 360-degree feedback review can be performed after completing a major project to assess how well the employee performed and to encourage their professional development. Or, you can make this an annual event to evaluate all employees. However, do not let this replace a traditional performance review—it should be an addition to it.
Example of a 360-degree feedback review template. (Source: FSB)
Engagement & Satisfaction Surveys
One of the best ways to assess your employees is with engagement and satisfaction surveys. These surveys help you see how engaged your employees are and where there may be issues in your team dynamics.
Consider using pulse surveys, which are shorter and more frequent. This will allow you to capture real-time feedback from employees so that you can quickly identify and address any issues or concerns that may arise. A pulse survey can be given after major projects, a company-wide conference, or anytime you want to gauge your employee’s satisfaction with their work and your company.
When creating an employee engagement survey consider the areas you want to cover—job satisfaction, team communication, work-life balance, or employee management support. Your surveys can be specific to just one topic or broad to cover a wide range of engagement and satisfaction areas.
Example of an employee engagement survey (Source: Performex)
Self-Assessments
A great way to understand how your employees view their own performance is to conduct self-assessments. This can be in paragraph form, based on a rating scale, or a combination of both (recommended). Ask open-ended questions that allow the employee to reflect on their performance and provide specific examples. You can combine a rating scale and long-form answers to get an overall picture of how they view themselves.
Self-assessments are just a small part of overall performance management, which uses tools, counseling, evaluation, and coaching to provide feedback for your employees that sheds light on areas that require an improvement plan or additional training.
Example of self-evaluation assessment form (Source: eforms.com)
Structured Interviews
Interviews are one of the first ways companies evaluate potential employees. These happen during the hiring process and can mean the difference between a candidate getting hired or not.
It’s important when conducting interviews that you ask the same questions to each candidate. This will ensure you get a clear picture of each candidate based on the same criteria. This type of interview is a structured interview and has a set of predetermined questions that cover skills, company culture, job requirements, and more.
Example of structured interview questions (Source: FSB)
Psychometric Testing
Psychometric testing, such as personality assessments and cognitive ability tests, involves assessing a potential candidate’s personality and behaviors to evaluate how well they will perform at your company and how they interact with colleagues. This type of testing should be used in conjunction with an evaluation of the candidate’s skills, experience, and education.
You can also give psychometric tests to your current employees to help them understand how they think, work with others, and handle conflict resolution. The results will help employees learn how to better handle tough situations and understand how to engage with other team members.
Example of Myers-Briggs assessment outcomes (Source: Wikipedia)
Advantages of Employee Assessments
Employee assessments help identify the strengths and weaknesses of your employees by providing observation of their skills, behaviors, and potential for growth. This, in turn, helps employers make informed decisions about career development, succession planning, and training programs.
Other advantages of employee assessments include:
- Helps determine training needs
- Enhances self-awareness
- Identifies specific skill sets
- Increases employee engagement
- Improves employee satisfaction
- Increases productivity
- Results in a higher retention rate
- Can help identify future leaders
- Sets expectations for job performance
- Measures goal progress
Best Practices for Conducting Employee Assessments
When conducting employee assessments, be sure to set clear objectives and ensure the assessment criteria align with your company goals. Additionally, incorporate a variety of assessment methods such as self-evaluations, peer reviews, and 360-degree feedback.
- Focus on performance: Your assessments should ultimately focus on your employee’s performance. Dive deep into where they are succeeding and where they may need additional training.
- Provide detailed feedback and development plans: An assessment only tells part of the story. Once you have insight into areas that need improvement, be sure to communicate that to your employees and provide a development plan.
- Set specific goals: Having clear goals and objectives set for your employees ensures they are focused on their tasks and reaching specific milestones.
- Avoid comparing employees: While it may feel natural to tell employees where others are doing better, it is not recommended as this could cause discontent among your staff.
- Recognize and enhance employee strengths: Even if your employee needs to improve in certain areas, be sure to highlight things they are doing well. This encourages them to continue to perform.
- Reward employees for their efforts: When an employee assessment shows a job well done, it’s a good idea to reward the employee for their performance. This can be monetary in the form of a raise, or simply a verbal indication of a job well done.
- Develop a training and professional development plan: Your work is not complete by just evaluating employees. Take it a step further and provide each employee with a training and development plan that enhances their job responsibilities.
Bottom Line
By conducting regular employee assessments you can identify areas for improvement, provide necessary training, and ensure your employees are engaged and motivated. Small businesses should prioritize these assessments to drive performance and achieve long-term success.
