Six Sigma Employee Evaluation

By Tony Jacowski

Businesses also have to strive towards maintaining the business processes at peak performance levels at all times. This has to be done to increase productivity, and stay well ahead of the competitors. There are various organizational challenges to face, including Voice Of Customer (VOC), and Return On Investment (ROI) projections.

Overcoming such challenges is not always an easy task, especially in the face of constantly changing targets. This is precisely why Six Sigma places a lot of importance on employee contributions, as they are the biggest assets that any organization can have (a fact that is sadly overlooked by many companies, even today!)

How Does Employee Assessment Work?

Such assessments can be used to generate quantitative metrics, often referred to as employee ratings. Businesses wanting to execute such rating techniques will need to employ internal as well as cross-organizational surveys. This will go a long way in assessing employee perceptions with respect to their existing work environment.

For ease of use, such surveys are often broken up into two different surveys- preliminary and comprehensive surveys. For the preliminary survey, only few select employees, a statistical sample representing the whole organization, are selected for the interview. This enables management to know the pulse of all employees in general.

It is recommended to conduct such surveys within informal and relaxed environments, in order to get the employees to voice their true opinions, and thus get a realistic picture. The feedback received can be used to compare the current situation with the created metrics.

Conducting Preliminary Surveys

It is important to ask the "right questions", in the correct context, to get the maximum results. Some commonly asked questions in such surveys are:

• Has the Six Sigma implementation helped in reducing your workload?

• Has it improved your immediate work environment?

• Has it helped in reducing process time?

• Has it helped in curbing or eliminating process variation?

• Has it helped you in realizing the fact that reducing defects saves time?

• Has it helped you to change your perception about the organization?

However, preliminary surveys are only able to provide a partial picture due to the limited sample size. It can only give a basic idea about whether there have been any positive changes in the employee outlook towards the organization, and overall performance. After this stage, one can move towards carrying out a comprehensive survey.

Comprehensive Surveys

Such surveys should be carried out in a particular manner so as to get the most out of the exercise. The interview team should be composed of at least one Master Black Belt, an HR representative and a senior employee from the same department. Since a general idea has already been achieved through preliminary survey, the interviewing should now focus on more personal questions.

The feedback can then be charted out in the form of graphs, and charts to get a visual representation.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions - Six Sigma Online (http://www.sixsigmaonline.org) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for six sigma professionals including, lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

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