This week, we’ve been discussing how to train employees. Once you’ve got your employee in place and they are now in charge of all these fantastic responsibilities, how do you ensure they are doing a good job? Quality control is a critical piece of your business operations.

The Employee Review

The Employee Review is your key to ensuring you have quality control. We recommend that you have a formal review process with employees every 6 or 12 months. You will assess two things:

1) is the employee reaching his/her goals?*

and

2) is the employee meeting or exceeding expectations as specified by his/her position?

(* this assumes you’ve set personal/career goals with your employee)

Get it on Paper

We encourage business owners to get this process onto paper. Have 5-10 criteria in the review that are important in your line of business. Have the employee self-evaluate their performance. This is an opportunity for them to identify their strengths and weakness. Then, you will evaluate the employee’s performance. Emphasize their strengths. Give the employee an opportunity to continue growing on their weaknesses.

This can be very eye-opening. You may learn that they want more responsibility and want to be more challenged. It’s an opportunity for you to reflect on what they are REALLY good at and maximize their potential.

On-going Feedback

You can also do a more casual review after each wedding (or after every order that you ship.) This will ensure that all the checks and balances are in place. In my stationery business, each order was reviewed by 2 people before it was packaged for the client. (There was an actual quality control review checklist.) This ensured that each piece of stationery that left my studio was of top quality. AND – get this(!) – my employees were also responsible for reviewing MY work. Quality control runs both ways.

What do you do in your employee reviews? Share in a comment below.

We have employee review templates and a load of other tools for hiring, training, and managing. Make sure to check out The People Plan for HR at your fingertips.