Peer evaluations are powerful tools for improving team performance and boosting employee development. Employees often value feedback from colleagues more than managerial feedback, and they are often more likely to take action on peer feedback.
To get the most from peer evaluations, you need to start by asking the right questions. Below are some of the best peer evaluation questions and templates you can use to improve your peer reviews.
Online peer evaluations: An overview
Feedback is important whether you’re the CEO or a college graduate, says Mila Urosevic, SEO project lead for digital search agency Noble Cuts: “If it’s constructive with the aim for improvement, expressed properly and received without getting into a defense, feedback helps us grow, learn from our actions, recognize similar situations in the future and get prepared to react adequately. It also improves communication and sets clear expectations among peers.”
Online peer evaluations offer a quick and convenient way for colleagues to give and receive feedback.
If you’re going to adopt a peer review process, though, there are a couple of things you need to bear in mind, note Alessandro Di Fiore and Marcio Souza in an article for Harvard Business Review.
The first is to tailor the frequency of reviews to the way your organization works. For instance, if you work in sprints, then request feedback at the end of every sprint.
The second is to focus on volume. “Moving to a social feedback system requires managing a large volume of feedback on a single person; but that feedback needs to come from a wide range of colleagues and not from a focused, inner circle,” they write. “A prompted system puts guardrails in place to ensure that managers get large and similar volumes of feedback for each employee.”
Peer evaluation questions and templates
Not sure what to ask employees in a peer review survey? We list some of the best peer evaluation questions below and the reasons why they’re valuable.
As you develop your questions, be sure to keep them clear and concise, advises the team at learning platform Eduflow. It can be tempting to combine multiple questions into one to shorten the review. But this leads to convoluted questions that are hard to understand and actually take longer to answer.
Here are some sample questions:
What are this employee’s strengths?
It’s good to start with things the employee does well. This can make potential criticism easier to digest.
What are this employee’s weaknesses?
The focus of peer evaluations should be to help employees improve. A good way to help them do that is to have their peers list what they perceive to be their areas for improvement.
How can this employee perform better?
Concrete examples are key to helping employees improve. That’s why it’s important to ask employees to list specific ways they think their colleagues can get better.
Name a specific time when this employee went above and beyond.
In the same vein, encourage employees to name specific occasions when the employee in question did their job admirably.
How well does this employee communicate with colleagues? Give examples.
Communication is a core part of almost any job. Employees need to understand how well colleagues think they communicate and how they can improve.
Easy and effective evaluation templates with Jotform
Don’t want to create your own peer evaluation questionnaire from scratch? Jotform is the ideal tool to help you build an online peer evaluation form in an instant.
Use one of Jotform’s peer evaluation templates as a jumping-off point, then customize it in a few clicks with the Jotform Form Builder. There are plenty of templates to choose from, including the annual peer performance evaluation template below.
Once you’ve finalized your form, you can embed it into your company’s intranet or email it to employees. Jotform Tables makes managing responses easy, too. Every reply will be automatically stored in a Jotform table, and you can track it and share it from there.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
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