Have you ever been through a performance evaluation? Was it a good or bad experience? How did it make you feel? Did you take it personally? In my Experiential Learning class at University of Guelph, Ridgetown Campus, I took on a task without knowing how valuable it could turn out to be. The class was created to develop an employee evaluation process that could be used in my job as Supervisor at Georgina Garden Centre. We didn’t have an employee evaluation process at the garden centre, but we knew that having one would reflect how well employees had been trained and how they are handling things.
     
     The evaluation contains criterion that we feel are important for employees working in a retail garden centre setting. The evaluation is broken into groups – technical skills, interpersonal skills and personal qualities. Sub-groups include job knowledge, productivity, independence, initiative, customer relations, attendance and growth.
The employees are rated on a scale of zero to four, with zero being the lowest score and four meaning exceptional. Each skill grouping has a percentile weight, which can be changed according to how much those skills matter to your business.

     All employees were told that the evaluation would reflect training. We wanted employees to clearly understand that evaluation is a way to improve individually and as a business. The intention is not only to highlight weak points, but to help everyone improve in all areas. It is important that everyone buys into the process and believes in the policies and procedures of the company.

     The results were interesting, to say the least. In my own evaluation, the first thing I forgot was the evaluation should not be taken personally. As a supervisor, I still found it difficult to hear.

     The goal of our evaluation is to help employees and supervisors improve in their jobs in the garden centre, and to provide a proven evaluation format for others in the industry. In the future we would like to tie the evaluation into our job application and interview so that employees know what to expect from the start. By doing this, we hope that our business will run more smoothly, with employees buying into the overall goals, selling themselves and selling products to the customers.

By Shannon Lindensmith

Shannon Lindensmith is a student at the University of Guelph, Ridgetown Campus, in her second year of the Associate Diploma in Horticulture program. She has a B.A. in Labour Studies from McMaster University. Ken Nentwig was the course instructor.