Employee Evaluation Comments: Giving Intelligible Feedback Your Employees Will Value and Act On

Today, it’s more important than ever before that you leverage your existing talent. Helping your current employees develop, grow, and improve their performance comes with a much lower price tag than onboarding new talent. Regular coaching and feedback are critical to that process, but sometimes the employee evaluation comments you provide are ambiguous, come across as harsh, or are simply too generic to get the job done.

How do you motivate employees to perform better while providing crucial information to help them grow and develop? It can be more challenging than you think. Not only is there the potential for your own employee evaluation comments to be misconstrued, but, today, employees receive feedback from a wide range of others in the organization, including peers. That deluge of information can be hard to digest and almost impossible to put into action.

For feedback conversations to achieve their goal (performance improvement and employee development), your comments must stand out, but for the right reasons. Your feedback must be clear, actionable, understandable, and constructive. In this post, we’ll cover employee evaluation comments that help you get the message across in the right way while ensuring that your employees value, understand, and can act on the message.

Employee Evaluation Comments That Support Action and Growth

Employee feedback is about more than just making course corrections or noting room for growth. It’s about inspiring confidence, supporting your team, and helping them to grow and achieve more for the business but also for themselves. The feedback terms we cover here will help you achieve those goals.

Ability to Communicate

Nothing is more important in the organization than clear, accurate, ongoing communication. It makes sense then that your employee feedback comments should fit the bill. Consider some of the following:

• You frequently interrupt when team members or others are sharing their input or offering suggestions.
• You frequently ask important follow-up questions during discussions to clarify the message.
• You clearly express your opinion in a professional, unambiguous way.
• You listen actively when coworkers or others are providing information or expressing their ideas or opinions.
• You clearly communicate your thoughts, ideas, and professional opinions in ways that contribute to success.

Ability to Lead

Everyone in the organization can benefit from actionable, accurate employee evaluation comments, even team leaders and managers. Consider some of the following ways to impart information and incite growth and development:

• You regularly support your team with the resources, information, and other tools required for success.
• You recognize when your team members go above and beyond, which affects morale and engagement.
• You act as a good role model for leading by example.
• Your leadership consistently exemplifies the company’s values and culture.

Ability to Work Together

The ability to collaborate with others, whether on the same team, on different teams, or across different departments, is critical. Consider using the following employee evaluation comments to recognize top performers, drive growth, and improve teamwork and collaboration:

• You regularly help build strong relationships across teams and departments.
• You show a constant willingness to work with others to achieve common goals.
• You often make others feel unappreciated or unable to do perform their jobs.
• You rarely share information or expertise necessary to help the team achieve its goals.

Ability to Manage Time and Responsibilities

Employees must be able to manage their time effectively. They must also be able to delegate accurately. Without those abilities, they’ll miss deadlines and milestones, derail projects, and otherwise struggle to achieve success. Consider using the following comments to communicate accurately:

• You regularly meet deadlines and progress toward milestones is always accurate.
• You regularly delegate responsibilities to others well, ensuring the team stays on schedule.
• You’re regularly late to meetings and often miss key milestones.
• You regularly run out of time to accomplish your tasks.

Ability to Innovate

It is not enough for employees to apply knowledge to a specific situation to achieve a particular outcome. They also need to be creative and innovative. They need vision and the willingness to experiment to achieve better outcomes. Consider using the following employee evaluation comments to communicate here:

• You regularly come up with new solutions to pressing challenges your team faces.
• You frequently share new ideas and insights with the team and across departments.
• You show curiosity and the ability to innovate and find new solutions to problems.
• You rarely take the time to experiment to find new solutions or approaches to issues.
• You’re hesitant to try new things.

Ability to Administrate

Without back office skills and expertise, the business would slowly grind to a halt. Employees need to have strong administrative skills and capabilities, and you can help build them up and foster growth with these employee evaluation comments:

• You regularly show strong organizational capabilities, even in fast-paced environments.
• You often struggle to organize documents and files.
• Your data capture and entry efforts often result in errors and inaccuracies.
• You excel at finding new ways to keep the office organized and running efficiently.

Ability to Solve Problems

Problem-solving is a critical capability for employees at all levels of the organization. Use these employee evaluation comments to build up your team members, improve their problem-solving skills, or to recognize those who consistently perform well:

• You show the ability to think clearly and accurately when problems occur.
• You often panic when you face a new situation or problem.
• When facing an issue, you show calmness and take a practical approach to finding a solution.
• You regularly consider alternative solutions to problems, which often results in a better fit and improved results.

Build Your Team

While the employee evaluation comments we’ve covered here will help you communicate more accurately and build your team up, it’s important to remember the point of it all: growth and development. Every action taken should help employees achieve more and become better in some way. What have your own experiences been with employee evaluation feedback? Share some of your success stories or major challenges in the comments below!