50 employee evaluation comments your team would like to hear

Career growth and development doesn’t happen without regular and meaningful feedback. Yet, a whopping 74% of employees feel uncertain about how their managers think they’re performing. Why? Well, employee evaluation comments are often too harsh, too ambiguous, or too generic. This leaves employees feeling confused, demotivated, and unappreciated.

You might not have had the chance to read it yet, but the 2018 LinkedIn Learning Trends Report made one thing crystal clear. Employees want career growth, they want development, and they want it now.

But the biggest concern is that employee performance comments aren’t just reserved for line managers. In many companies, employees receive feedback from peers, senior managers, training managers, and even need to rate their own performance, in order to truly understand where their potential lies. That’s a lot of feedback!

For these feedback conversations to offer value, it’s important to use performance appraisal comments that are phrased simply, clearly, constructively, and delivered with a dash of “human touch.” So, we’ve created a list of helpful performance evaluation comments phrased in plain English to give you a head start on your next appraisal!

Employee Evaluation Comments Your Team Will Understand

No matter your industry, the following phrases are a surefire way to build your confidence in delivering effective feedback to employees. These are 50 of the most valuable employee performance evaluation comments which can be customized for your own feedback conversations.

Communication Skills

Communication is the glue that holds people together in an organization, and keeps them working toward a shared goal. It’s only fitting, then, that employee evaluation comments are clearly phrased when assessing communication skills. Here are a few to consider:

1. “You deliver instructions and explain expectations with clarity and purpose.”
2. “You listen well in meetings with colleagues.”
3. “You frequently interrupt colleagues when they offer opinions or suggestions.”
4. “You express your opinions clearly, carefully, and objectively.”
5. “You make arguments in a constructive and convincing way.”

Leadership and Management Skills

Employee appraisal comments are often made by leaders and managers, not to them. However, senior employees also need feedback in order to become the best leaders and managers they can be. For example, an employee could be encouraged during the evaluation process to take online leadership courses in order to hone their managerial skills.

The following comments are useful for aspiring leaders, too:

6. “You prepare your team with the resources and training necessary to perform well in their jobs.”
7. “You hold employees accountable for their own performance and goal achievement.”
8. “You rarely recognize and reward employees for positive workplace behaviors.”
9. “You fail to guide employees on ways to contribute to the company’s vision.”
10. “You serve as a role model by consistently behaving in line with the company’s values.”

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Teamwork and Collaboration Abilities

Comments on staff performance reviews are often concerned with teamwork, team building, and collaboration, especially in high-innovation and project-based environments. If this describes your team, then these are the comments to use:

11. “You tend to make others feel incompetent and unappreciated.”
12. “You’re always willing to help others in their tasks.”
13. “You’re hesitant to share knowledge and ideas with other team members.”
14. “You trust and support other team members to take ownership of their tasks.”
15. “You’re great at building positive relationships with others on your team.”

Time Management and Delegation Skills

In today’s crazy, fast-paced world, many employees fail to effectively manage their time through time-saving strategies, like delegation and prioritization. Here are some time management comments for employee evaluation:

16. “I’ve noticed you often run out of time to complete tasks.”
17. “You prioritize your tasks in order of importance and urgency very well.”
18. “You often arrive late for meetings.”
19. “You delegate tasks to colleagues who have the skills and time to complete them.”
20. “You consistently meet deadlines.”

Creativity and Innovation

Margaret Heffernan once said that “For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate”. Here are a few employee evaluation comments for assessing the behaviors and abilities that lead to innovation:

21. “You often find new and novel solutions to problems.”
22. “You are curious and seek different perspectives.”
23. “You show resistance to experimentation.”
24. “You seem to prefer rules and standards over creativity and exploration.”
25. “You frequently share new ideas in team meetings.”

Administrative Skills

Administration is important in every business and every industry. These skills are often easily measured. This makes it possible for employees’ performance evaluation comments about administrative skills to be clear and simple:

26. “You maintain an organized filing system.”
27. “You frequently find more efficient ways to sort and organize documents.”
28. “You capture and sort information in an organized and efficient manner.”
29. “You often lose or misplace documents or files.”
30. “You tend to make errors when capturing data.”

Goal Achievement

Every company has a strategic vision that is cascaded down to each and every employee’s own performance goals. When employees don’t achieve their goals, the company can’t realize its vision, either. This makes work evaluation comments about achievement super important:

31. “You consistently work hard to achieve your performance goals.”
32. “You willingly request the training and support necessary to achieve your goals.”
33. “You consistently underperform in comparison to your peers.”
34. “You consistently fail to meet your performance objectives.”
35. “You always deliver the desired results when goals are realistic.”

Problem-solving Abilities

Has there ever been a business without a problem to solve? The likely answer is NO. So, all employees need problem-solving abilities in order for the company to continuously grow and improve. We’ve listed 5 of the most important problem-solving evaluation remarks for employees below:

36. “You tend to panic in the face of new problems.”
37. “You tackle problems with a calm, practical and proactive approach.”
38. “You always suggest solutions that are evidence-based.”
39. “You often neglect to consider alternative solutions to a problem.”
40. “You focus on the symptoms of the problem instead of the cause of the problem.”

Productivity

When employees aren’t productive, the company isn’t performing optimally. But high productivity requires that employees ‘work smart’, and never exchange quality for quantity. Here are a few sample employee evaluation comments for assessing productivity:

41. “You consistently meet production expectations.”
42. “You frequently fail to meet the team’s production goals.”
43. “You significantly contribute to our team’s productivity.”
44. “You haven’t improved productivity since our last evaluation.”
45. “You’ve increased productivity but at the expense of quality.”

Learning and Development

Learning and development is a key competitive advantage for companies today. But it’s also a personal journey of growth and career advancement for many employees. For this reason, self-evaluations are often used to assess learning and development.

These often take the form of self-report questionnaires where employees rate their learning on a Likert scale of 1 to 5. Here are some of the most valuable employee self-evaluation comments that should be included in these questionnaires:

“I…”

46. “learn new skills in order to adapt to change.”
47. “actively encourage my colleagues to learn.”
48. “shy away from learning as a team.”
49. “strive to promote learning in the workplace.”
50. “see mistakes as an opportunity for learning and development.”

Over to you

Elon Musk said in an interview that the best advice is to constantly be thinking about what you’ve done, and how you could do it better.

Perhaps your employee evaluation comments could be better phrased to promote employee learning and growth, and leave your team feeling clear and confident about their performance? Share your experience of employee evaluation feedback conversations in the comments below!