Not all nonprofit organizations use performance evaluation to improve company performance. According to most organizations surveyed, the performance evaluation process is their weakest link and is seen as a weakness, despite the several benefits it can bring, namely employee engagement, increased motivation, and an overall improved work environment. Ironically, the hallmark of nonprofit organizations is their soft and caring culture. In this article, we’ll look at how to do performance evaluations for nonprofit organizations in the best way possible.
What is a performance evaluation?
The ultimate goal of a successful performance evaluation is to embed it in the culture of the organization, not only at the executive and board level but also with regular managers and employees who are faced with the day-to-day challenges and workflows of the company.
Achieving such a result can be difficult, especially for non-scale companies where time and money issues are more acute and tangible, and quality training for line managers can be difficult. On the other hand, even in larger companies, asking managers to do performance evaluations in addition to their main job sounds almost impossible. To solve this problem, experts recommend that managers be made aware of all the benefits that performance appraisal will bring and the structure of how the process should be conducted. It is essential to check that the executives who have the responsibility of performance appraisal know exactly what they are doing or they will not get a good result.
Elements of an effective evaluation performance board
For a performance evaluation process to be properly defined, nonprofit organizations must identify and include three basic elements, which we discuss in more detail below:
- Objective setting
When setting goals, it does not matter much who worked on shaping them, just managers, or with employee involvement. The important thing is that every employee understands why these goals are so important, and what is expected and required of them. The office structure and culture of nonprofit organizations are different from other types of businesses, so it’s especially important for them to make the connection between managers and subordinates as well as staff targets and their impact on productivity and the organization’s ability to follow its mission. Each employee is expected to display some kind of skill that would contribute to the company’s goals.
- Providing feedback
It is vital that members of staff are aware that they are moving in the right direction, so feedback from managers about their performance is very important to them. Managers should outline exactly how their subordinate is doing against set goals, highlight praise, and point out where they could do better. It doesn’t have to be formal feedback, but it must be clearly defined or it is useless. Comments from the leader have to be meaningful, and by no means accusatory. Rather than just pointing out mistakes and asking for them to be corrected, you can share useful ways to improve their performance and avoid those mistakes in the future.
- Annual Review
A performance review can be thought of as a summary of achieved results and performance measures, which includes the results of all formal and informal conversations, as well as feedback from customers and managers. The performance review basically contains all the things that employees were informed about during the performance improvement, but they are still necessary for a sense of achievement of some kind. Managers should spend a few hours collecting data and forming a quality review for each employee that contains the best and worst areas of the employee’s performance and the actions that were taken to achieve the goals.