Truvelop Tip: Best Practices for Ensuring Rater Reliability During the Evaluation Process

As a member of the Customer Success Team at Truvelop, Juliana Withers works directly with our customers and end users and is constantly looking for ways to improve the overall user experience. During one of her weekly calls, a customer recently asked about Rater Reliability and best practices for ensuring that her managers were consistently conducting fair and objective evaluations. And just like that, Carreen Kouts, HR Director of R2integrated, LLC inspired Juliana to add a new resource to our Knowledge Center.

Having studied Performance Psychology in undergrad and now finishing up her Masters’ degree, this is a topic that Juliana is very passionate about. In some of her previous work, she had the opportunity to teach self-regulation, which is a core component to avoiding Rater Bias. High rater reliability starts with the individual Juliana explains, “(a)n evaluator must self-assess their emotions, energy levels, ability to focus before each evaluation. If there is even one case of a manager completing evaluations while they are angry, tired, or distracted, the data can become skewed and inaccurate.”

What is Rater Reliability?

Rater reliability is the concept that when something is being assessed or evaluated, it would yield the same accurate score, no matter who is doing the rating. If you were evaluating one of your Team Members, a sign of high rater reliability would be if another Manager gave the same scores in the evaluation of that same Team Member. Essentially, if you had the same information in front of you each time, you would assign the same score. Ideally, we want to strive for high rater reliability as it means that we have accurate data and a clear picture of employee performance.

What is Rater Bias?

So, what happens when rater reliability is absent? When objectivity is removed, rater bias takes place. This means that the rater gives a score that would not be completely accurate because they allowed emotions, fatigue, low focus, etc. to influence their evaluation process. If there is unchecked rater bias occurring during the evaluation process, the data is skewed and does not present an accurate picture of employee performance.

Rater Reliability Using the Truvelop App

In our newest page added to the Manager Resource Center, Juliana shares with our user community several types of Rater Bias to be aware of and to avoid, in addition to a series of questions that guide evaluators through a self-assessment process to determine if they are ready to fairly and objectively evaluate their Team Members. By encouraging our users to consistently employ strong evaluation practices, we can yield the most accurate data possible, which in turn allows users to maximize the rich data driven insights revealed with each evaluation. Rater Reliability starts with the individual, but when practiced in the Truvelop app, it promotes growth and success across the entire organization.

Truvelop as the Solution

Truvelop creates solutions that help businesses evaluate, develop, and maximize the performance of their team. Truvelop is not just an employee assessment tool, Truvelop also promotes the delivery of real-time feedback and recognition to employees with our Spark feature and our Recognition Wall to supercharge on-going performance development conversations between managers and employees.

Contact us today to learn more or send us an email at sales@truvelop.com to schedule a demo to find out how your business can benefit from our industry-leading, modern approach to goal setting, performance management and development.

It’s not too late to revamp your annual review process for 2021!