Employee evaluations. Reading these words, a picture probably flashes in your mind: A supervisor and an employee sitting in a room. The atmosphere is slightly tense, their interactions are a tad awkward. While this might be the case for some, it doesn’t always have to be! When evaluations are handled with openness, honesty, and integrity, it can be a worthwhile, confidence-boosting practice for everyone.
At Itch, healthy and authentic communication is at our core. So this year, we’ve decided to revamp and fortify our evaluations system. This overhaul ensures that we provide everyone with fair, accurate, and honest feedback that’s relevant to what they do in the company. Such a monumental enterprise doesn’t happen overnight nor can it be done by one person alone. As Operations Manager Jervic Perlas said during our town hall, this process entails a lot of steps that requires everyone’s participation. And as with everything we did, we used our core values of Collaboration, Adaptability, Perseverance, Integrity, and Excellence to guide and inform us at every step.
Everyone’s input is at the heart of this project, which is why this venture is special for Itch. At the start of the revamp, each department collaborated to conduct an audit of their respective job descriptions (JD) making sure everyone’s insights were heard and applied where needed. This might not be a common employment practice, but we still did it so each JD accurately documents what every department does. By starting this way, we are sure that the questions we’ll come up with correlate to what we do regularly.
After a thorough audit, we were ready to formulate new questions for the revamped evaluations form. In this step, we made sure to craft the questions in a way that is specific, measurable, attainable, and relevant to the responsibilities in our job descriptions. We also overhauled the questions for our core competencies evaluation. For every letter of CAPIE, we developed questions that assess different dimensions of the core value. For example, to evaluate how a team member embraced the core value of perseverance, we didn’t just see how well they persisted in the face of challenges, we also considered how readily they applied themselves to the task at hand.
Our new evaluations system is now based on two metrics: quality and consistency.
Our previous evaluation system was made to measure occurrence—does a person perform a specific task—and is scored based on how well the evaluator agrees that someone performed that task, which made for a vague and sometimes inaccurate assessment of one’s work performance. The new revamped evaluation system is now hinged on two things: quality and consistency. According to Senior Copywriter Lui Milanes, this new system not only evaluates the quality of one's job, it also checks how consistent people are at delivering a job well done. The questions we formulated measure the quality of work that one does and are answered by frequency-based responses—always, often, sometimes, occasionally, and never—each holding an equivalent numerical value. By structuring evaluations this way, assessments were more concrete, making assessments less ambiguous.
Of course, this project would not be complete without a makeover! On top of the new questions and answers, we also gave our questionnaire and feedback reports a new look. Besides its aesthetic, this updated layout helped make the process of giving and receiving feedback more seamless and easier to understand.
The entire process took us almost two months to accomplish, but the results were definitely worth all the time and effort. According to our Associate Creative Director Audrey Orallo, the new system was more efficient for her as a supervisor because everything is organized in an orderly manner, which allowed for smoother and clearer evaluation. Art Director Lorelie Suede also shares that the clear-cut questions along with the frequency-based answers gave her a system that helped her look back at her work with other people as she gave her evals. She says that this made evaluations seem more accurate and honest.
Members of the Itch team during the launch of the new evals system
Revamping an evaluations system is no easy feat but with everyone involved, we were able to pull off this momentous undertaking. In the launch of the new evals system, Managing Director Armand Sazon notes that this project is something he is proud of because every single Itch contributed to make it happen. Creating a system made by and for the Itches allowed us to zero in on the traits that matter to us. And with a people-centric approach, our hope is that it delivers positive, authentic, and excellent results for everyone.