Questions for Subordinates to Evaluate a Supervisor
Typically, supervisors conduct job evaluations of subordinates to determine areas of strength, areas of improvement, and an employee’s overall satisfaction in the workplace. On occasion, however, subordinates are given the opportunity to evaluate their supervisors. If you’re a supervisor facing an evaluation, you can create a list of questions that your employees can use to evaluate your performance.
Communication is the key to a successful working relationship between you and your staff. If you delegate tasks without clearly explaining what is expected of your team, the work they perform may not reach the standard you expect. In fact, communication issues are often the biggest source of conflict between workers and their supervisors. When employees don’t understand the parameters, standards, and timeline of a project, they’re set up for failure. By giving your employees the opportunity to talk about what’s working and what's not, you may find better ways to deal with them, which can boost morale, efficiency and productivity.
Staff workers expect their supervisors to lead effectively, so it’s important for you to understand what they think of your leadership skills. This question doesn’t simply ask them if you’re a leader. It asks them to list specific qualities that they believe makes you a leader. Notice that there’s no room for them to list any negative qualities regarding your leadership, because this question is solely designed for you to learn what leadership strengths your workers think you possess.
Conversely, you also need to know the areas in which you’re lacking in leadership skills, and this question will provide you with that answer. Rather than taking these responses personally, strive to view them as areas of improvement that will make you a better leader.
This is an important question that will help you learn whether your workers think that you value their opinion. Good leaders enable their subordinates to feel as if their opinion matters, when it comes to workplace decisions, whereas a supervisor that's viewed as not being open to other opinions, may not be maximizing the talents and skills of her employees.
Approachable supervisors have earned the trust of their workers, and have developed open lines of communication. Supervisors that employees are afraid to approach are failing at the basic task of communication, and that can have a detrimental effect on work productivity and morale. Negative feedback on this question may convince you to change your demeanor or the way you communicate with your staff.
One of the biggest reasons employees leave a company is because they don't feel like they're growing on the job. That usually happens when a supervisor and an employee aren’t on the same page, when it comes to continuing education, specialized training, and aligning employee skills with the proper tasks. As a supervisor, one of your jobs is to help your workers develop new skills so that they can earn promotions and feel valued.