I’ve written a number of articles on how to write performance reviews, sample performance review comments, and how to develop your employees’ strengths. One of the questions that a couple of people have asked is: how do you put it all together? Over a series of posts, I am going to provide some sample employee performance reviews to assist you in writing the performance appraisals for your employees. In this post, I’m going to introduce Bill, a two year veteran of our retail store. Bill started out as a salesperson and moved into a supervisory role about a year ago. Bill is an excellent supervisor.
Sample Employee Performance Review for a Retail Store Supervisor (Excellent Employee)
Summary
Bill has been with the company for just over two years and, during that time, has shown a desire to increase his responsibilities, take on new projects, and improve processes within his team. Bill started as a salesperson and demonstrated the right attitude, interpersonal skills, and business knowledge to move into a supervisory role over one of the store’s sales departments. During his tenure as a supervisor, sales have increased 18%, turnover is down 45%, and the 360 degree reviews by his direct reports have shown him to be an excellent manager. Bill needs to continue to grow in his role. Specifically, he should focus on his time management skills and learn how to delegate more responsibilities to his team members. Bill has proven to be a wonderful addition to our team.
Customer Service Skills
One of the keys to Bill’s success as a supervisor and as an employee with our store is his focus on customer service. In a down economy and difficult retail environment, we must focus our teams on how to best service our customers. Bill’s desire to improve customer service ratings in his department led to fewer complaints this year over last and was one of the major reasons Bill was promoted to become a supervisor. There have been several situations this year with difficult customers where Bill has been able to intervene and solve difficult situations.
Bill’s desire to quickly solve a customer’s problem has led to a couple of situations where Bill should slow down and listen fully to what the customer says before moving forward. We appreciate his eagerness, but some customers just “want to be heard” and there have been a couple of situations with irate customers where Bill “jumps the gun” to try to solve the problem while the customer just wants to explain the problem. We recommend Bill review our customer service methodology for dealing with difficult customers:
Listen
Acknowledge
Apologize
Fix It
Follow-up
The first step in our methodology is to Listen to the customer and to then Acknowledge the customer’s problem. We do appreciate Bill’s desire to assist the customer and recognize this issue has only occurred occasionally.
Bill has a strength in customer service and over the next year, he should work on continuing to improve those skills.
Teamwork
Teamwork is an essential part of being an employee at our store and Bill has been a great team member. From his first month, Bill has always been available to work different shifts, cover for his fellow employees, and work with new employees to help them find success. His teamwork on the floor has led to several big sales for his fellow team members and Bill is very humble when he could take a lot of credit for their success. Bill works well with different types of personalities and consistently helps team members when they face difficulties.
Bill can continue to improve in this area over the next year and expand out his successes to fellow department supervisors.
Supervisory Skills
As a new supervisor, Bill has had a lot to learn about management. The most difficult transition for Bill has been from being a friend to his coworkers to being their boss. There were a number of times early on in Bill’s role as a supervisor where he has had to make tough decisions about friends and he has made those decisions fairly and with little problems from his team.
Bill has proved to be a demanding but fair boss for his team. This combination has produced great results for the store as his department’s sales are up 18% year over year. He has shown a skill at producing the right sales displays and product mix on his section’s shelves. His promotional ideas during last year’s Superbowl were fantastic and contributed quite a bit to the sales increase. We appreciate the creativity and attention to detail Bill has shown in his area.
Turnover on his team has reduced 45% year over year. We understand part of this was due to the economy, part due to the increased commissions we offered, but overall, Bill’s attention to his team members was also a major contributing factor. Bill has shown to have an aptitude when it comes to management and we like the initiative he has shown in providing training and support to his team.
Bill can continue to grow in a number of areas as a supervisor. There were a small number of complaints about Bill showing favoritism to Jerry, but those complaints have been resolved and there have been no new ones in several months. We recommend Bill continue to focus on separating friendships from his supervisory role.
We also recommend Bill grow as a supervisor by returning to school part time. His lack of a Bachelor’s degree may impede his movement up at this company and we would like to see Bill grow as an employee. Returning to school will help Bill grow and reach the goals he described in his self-appraisal.
Update: We recently launched a new site, http://ihateperformancereviews.com/, which has sample phrases, performance reviews, and excellent articles about performance management.