Service Untitled

Companies spend a lot of time and money on evaluating their employees and making sure their frontline employees delivering the best possible service and helping customers as much as possible. However, the same companies often forget to evaluate someone who is just as important: the supervisors and other managers who oversee these frontline employees.

Evaluating supervisors is a subtle science. The supervisors’ supervisors can evaluate them, which is somewhat useful, or better yet, the employees who report to the supervisors can evaluate them.

Try to make it a regular process to send a survey to employees (making sure the feedback they give will be kept confidential) asking them to evaluate their supervisors in a number of areas. Ask how the supervisors encourage career growth and development, ask about how accessible they are, and so on. Consider the problems and issues that have been reported and then ensure the survey contains questions that address those problems and issues.

After the results are in, it should be pretty easy to compare multiple supervisors against each other fairly objectively. If most supervisors do really well in one area and one doesn’t, it’s most likely a problem with that particular supervisor. If the entire group of supervisors does poorly in one area, chances are a policy or a procedure needs to be changed or implemented to address that area.

What is important is that supervisors know that employees have a chance to express their concerns and that they need to be held accountable as well. Employees often have good ideas about the ways things should and shouldn’t be and they work with their supervisors on a day-to-day basis. Chances are, their feedback about how their supervisor works (or doesn’t work) is something that would be useful to know.