Benefits of Peer Evaluation As An Employee Empowerment Tool

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Managers do not have it easy. Charged with motivating, training, and monitoring employee productivity all at the same time, they often find their responsibilities running counter to each other. Regardless, managers must find a way to be successful with each responsibility, and provide results in the forms of high productivity and a happy workforce - at the lowest cost.

Peer Evaluation as a Motivational & Accountability Tool

At MyOffice, we’ve found that one of the best ways to empower and strengthen our workforce is to give them the ability to evaluate each other. Not only does it give each employee a voice, but it makes them more accountable to each other and their jobs.

In addition, their final quarterly scores are not based solely on peer evaluation--but on input from customers and managers as well. So employees get a 360-degree feedback of their performance and at same time, find comfort knowing their peers are not  only judges, but rather an important part of the whole process.

Pros and Cons of a Peer Evaluation System

In considering whether or not to implement your own peer evaluation process, consider the pros and cons:

Benefits Helps employees become more autonomous, responsible and involved. Encourages employees to critically analyze work done by others and look for areas of improvement. Helps clarify job responsibilities. Gives employees a wider range of feedback.

Potential Disadvantages Employees may lack the ability to evaluate each other. Employees may not take it seriously, allowing friendships, entertainment value, etc. to influence their evaluations. Employees may push back due to possibility of discrimination, being misunderstood, etc. Managers may intervene too little--leaving employees to potentially misinform each other.

MyOffice’s peer evaluation program has been active for over 3 years.

The program has been highly successful in empowering strong employees and weeding out weaker ones. It has also contributed to our culture of feedback, transparency and individual accountability--which in turn encourages employees to take the evaluations more seriously.  It has become an important self-fulfilling cycle in which our team has come to look forward to evaluation time as a conversation using relevant data.  It is an opportunity for improvement--as opposed to the dreaded annual review where they lack control over the process. MyOffice’s peer evaluation program has been so successful, in fact, that results are now used as a sales tool to demonstrate the quality of our team, which directly yields the quality of the service experience.

Interested in Beginning Your Own Peer Evaluation System?

A few critical steps will get you on the path to success:

• Make sure your managers on board. Be certain they understand the purpose and how it will work. Without their buy-in, it simply won’t work.
• Define the parameters for how employees are evaluated so there is consistency. Be sure to determine how employees with very high marks might be rewarded, and conversely, how employees with low marks will be dealt with.
• In an “All Hands” type of meeting, introduce the system to employees as a very positive, rewarding experience.
• Follow through. This is where many businesses fail, leaving employees feeling initiatives don’t matter and breaking down motivation (the opposite of your intention!).
   

Implementing a peer evaluation system is not complex or difficult, and the rewards can be great: From a happier, more productive workforce to managers who can focus on moving things forward rather than monitoring behavior. Overall, focus on building a team, and see what a difference it can make.