Employee Assessment is one of the steps to realizing a company’s weak points and evaluating potential income that can be brought by singular employees.
Without a proper strategy, tools, and an understanding of how tedious the process can be, it can be quite difficult to achieve adequate results.
What is Employee Assessment?
By Employee Assessment we mean collective HR practices that allow to evaluate employee performance over a certain period of time.
Some companies perform assessments once a year. However more brands today are adopting a more regular model to gather data continuously. This allows for more accurate data and helps to detect weaknesses and work on eliminating them along the way.
Why it’s useful to conduct Employee Assessments?
Such evaluations are not only good to check the productivity levels of employees, but they also have a list of other benefits:
Detect strengths & weaknesses
By regularly conducting assessments you can see exactly what strengths your employees have and redirect them to the tasks they would work best on. On the other hand, every found weakness can be mitigated by additional training, courses, etc.
Assess satisfaction levels
Satisfied employees are more likely to have higher productivity levels: they generally provide better services and excel at the job they hold in high regard. You can include Employee satisfaction surveys in your general rounds of assessments, and see how you can make your employees happier and more engaged in your vision.
Find training possibilities
Every weakness is just another training opportunity. You have a chance to increase the qualification of your employees. Also, people value companies that are willing to provide means for growth; this is a ticket to a successful career.
Increase loyalty and retention rates
As we mentioned, people like workplaces where they can grow, and where it’s obvious that the company cares for them. Regular assessments are also a way to check what you lack to encourage your best employees to stay.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s take a look at what are some of the best practices that will help you conduct an all-around employee assessment.
Gather 360-degree Feedback
360-degree feedback is a practice that implies gathering feedback from all people who work with a certain employee. This may mean customers, managers, subordinates, HR, etc. Once and again you can have people fill in an anonymous form about a certain employee. Then, you can analyze the general results, and decide on the next steps.
This is a novel way of conducting employee assessments as it looks at employee performance from different angles.
Engage in Mystery Shopping/Mystery Calling
This method has been around for decades and is still rather effective. With the help of the mystery shopping campaigns, you can assess the factual adherence to service rules, and sales strategies, as well as a vast list of other skills, including:
- The ability to connect with the client, and detect their needs;
- The ability to work under stress, and handling of conflicts;
- Product/service knowledge;
- The ability to ‘sell’.
Mystery shopping is a practice that helps to better understand the experience of customers. It implies field-based research made by independent auditors who pretend to be customers. They are called “mystery shoppers.” They visit a particular business branch and gather information about the quality of service delivery and product.
Mystery Calling is a similar procedure, but instead of going to the physical/online shop, callers call the place and play out different scenarios over the phone. Mystery calling campaigns are usually conducted by big companies. When there are a lot of employees it is impossible to control their performance easily.
This practice is also suitable for companies who are very invested in making the customer experience as enjoyable as possible.
During a mystery call, you can easily evaluate waiting time, situation handling, communication skills, Product/Service/Company knowledge, and more.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
The customer satisfaction survey is a simple questionnaire designed to garner feedback from clients and users. It is widely used to gather opinions on services, and experiences, however, you can also effectively use it as a tool to evaluate your employees.
You can easily send your customers a little How would you rate your overall experience cooperating with [Employee]?
This way is effective if you want to evaluate employees who work directly with clients and influence the overall impression of the brand.
Find a perfect solution for Employee Assessment
In order to effectively perform Employee Evaluations, you will need a professional CX & Mystery Shopping platform – like Checker. As an all-in-one platform, it will allow you to easily create survey campaigns, that will be running constantly and regularly: this way you can stay consistent with your research.
You will be able to easily create and run surveys, create and monitor Mystery Shopping campaigns, and later analyze the data that are gathered automatically and presented in a neat dashboard.
With Checker’s help, you can sort your data by employees, and monitor their performances/growth/stats, etc.
