Chapter 9. The Best Phrases for Quality and Quantity of Work

In This Chapter

• Building and reinforcing employee output

• Identifying and enhancing employee thoroughness

• Assessing and rewarding time-management skills

Two primary areas of emphasis in the performance appraisal process are the quality and quantity of each employee’s work. Quality and quantity are two central performance measures for which employees need thorough and accurate feedback. Regardless of performance, when such feedback is questionable, productivity is likely to be questionable, too.

Your written comments are a great opportunity to provide employees with complete and long-lasting feedback on the quality and quantity of their work. On the one hand, writing a general statement indicating that an employee needs to produce more or do a neater job is easy; so is simply writing a statement that there are no quality or quantity problems. But these comments have no impact when it comes to sustaining excellent performance or improving marginal performance.

In order for your written feedback to have a long-lasting impact, you need to focus on the individual performance factors that determine the quality and quantity of your employees’ work, such as accuracy, detail-mindedness, productivity, multi-tasking, and setting priorities, to name just a few. The best strategy is to include targeted phrases that energize an employee to keep up the good work in key areas, while also encouraging employees to focus more carefully on the quality …