Performance evaluations should be conducted fairly

Performance evaluations should be conducted fairly, consistently and objectively to protect your
employees’ interests and to protect your practice from legal liability. One way to ensure
consistency is to use a standard evaluation form for each evaluation. The form you use should
focus only on the essential job performance areas. Limiting these areas of focus makes the
assessment more meaningful and relevant and allows you and the employee to address the issues
that matter most. It doesn’t need to cover every detail of an employee’s performance in an
evaluation. For most staff positions, the job performance areas that should be included on a
performance evaluation form are job knowledge and skills, quality of work, quantity of work,
work habits and attitude. In each area, the appraiser should have a range of descriptors to choose
from far below requirements, below requirements, meets requirements, exceeds requirements,
far exceeds requirements. Depending on how specific the descriptors are, it’s often important that
the appraiser also have space on the form to provide the reasoning behind of employee’s rating.
2. IDENTIFY PERFORMANCE MEASURES.
Standard performance measures, which allow you to evaluate an employee’s job performance
objectively, can cut down on the amount of time and stress involved in filling out the evaluation
form. Although developing these measures can be one of the more time-consuming parts of
creating a performance evaluation system, it’s also one of the most powerful. If the current job
descriptions for each position for practice, it already taken the first step toward creating standard
performance measures, which are essentially specific quantity and quality goals attached to the
tasks listed in a job description. A job description alone can serve as a measurement tool during
an evaluation if, for example, you’re assessing whether an employee’s skills match the
requirements of the position. But standard performance measures take the job description one
step further. For example, one task listed in a receptionist’s job description might be entering

new and updated patient registrations into the computer. The standard performance measure for
that task might be to enter 6 to 12 registrations per day quantity with an error rate of less than 2
percent quality.
3. SET GUIDELINES FOR FEEDBACK.
Feedback is what performance evaluations are all about. So before it implement the performance
evaluation system, make sure that employees who will be conducting evaluations knows what
kind of feedback to give, how to give it and how to get it from the employee in return. Give
balanced feedback. Don’t make the common error of glossing over an employee’s deficiencies
and focusing only on his or her strengths. It is by understanding their weaknesses that employees
can take ownership of their performance and role in the practice. And when given the support
they need to make improvements in these areas, employees learn to take pride in their work and