Employee assessments and performance reviews are an often-resource-intensive endeavor requiring training, time from HR, and third-party tooling for assessment, testing, and monitoring programs. Whether you’re attempting to validate the efficacy of employee assessments, attempting to streamline them to meet goals, or attempting to gain buy-in for improvements from management, understanding how these assessments do and should impact business results will help.
Employee assessments exist to tell you the state of employees and their performance, which can be used to impact numerous business results.
Documentation for Workforce Protection
Employee assessments exist to inform you of employee performance and progress towards performance goals. Documenting this progress and follow-up practices allows you to protect your organization and the employees who are part of it. For example, having routine employee assessments in place allow you to target individuals who are poor performers. You can then take targeted steps to improve that performance:
- Identify problems. What’s behind poor performance
- Identify development opportunities. Where can individuals improve?
- Identify candidates who are performing poorly because they are in the wrong roles
- Discuss performance issues with individuals and work to find solutions
- Highlight candidates who don’t improve after 3-9 months of development for possible termination
How will this work to improve business results? Actively responding to employee assessments enables you to lift performance for the organization, improving work turnaround, reducing turnover, improving motivation, and offering opportunities for individuals with problems or misalignment with roles and goals.
Streamlining a Workforce to Achieve Goals
Understanding what your workforce is capable of will allow you to make better decisions regarding work-force optimization, development, and hiring or onboarding to meet future goals. For example, if you know the organization wants to achieve something specific, employee assessment can give you a better starting point with which to begin steering the workforce to meet those goals. This applies even when future organizational goals include restructures or changing departments, because assessments help you understand what people can do and therefore where you can move them and why.
Streamlining your workforce to achieve goals also involves offering development to improve performance, moving individuals who aren’t suited to a particular role, removing individuals who simply aren’t performing or responding, and hiring to fill performance gaps.
Finally, this includes hiring individuals who meet assessment requirements or job profiles to fill specific roles well. If you know what the organization needs to achieve specific results, you can design a recruitment plan and hire for it, whether that includes leaders or those with leadership potential, high-performance individuals, or individuals showing promise in specific roles and categories.
Reducing Employee Turnover
Employee turnover relates to poor employee-role fit, poor reactions to performance, and no room for development. Using performance assessments to identify and improve role-fit, to offer those development opportunities, and to create room to improve performance rather than simply being handed a rating will work to improve employee satisfaction and company loyalty. Both of these factors will reduce turnover which will help the organization achieve goals, including saving money.
Employee assessment interacts with and impacts business goals and results, because the state of the workforce affects an organization’s ability to achieve anything. Approaching any type of improvement in processes around assessments and performance review, including pitching ideas to management, should involve approaching the problem from those business results.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
