When you hire a nanny, housekeeper, chef or house manager to come work in your home, you become an employer. A part of your responsibilities as an employer should be to provide written evaluations. These evaluations are an important tool to keeping the relationship with your domestic employee strong. It’s important to make the time and effort to meet with your employee regularly to ensure everyone is happy or where there may be concerns or need for improvements. Performance reviews are also a great tool to track strengths and weaknesses of both the family and the employee, and if you ever need to terminate the relationship, you have a record of what’s transpired.
Schedule the meeting. The best approach to a performance review is to request a sit-down with your employee a week or so in advance. This may be a day where you arrive late to work or come home early one day. We also suggest that the children not be present, so you’ll want to choose a time where there are no distractions of kids or work to get in the way of the discussion. If you’re asking your employee to come in early, stay late or meet on a weekend, it’s fair to pay them for that time. Performance reviews should be done annually, but if you are hiring a new employee, you may consider doing one at three or six months into the employment. Performance reviews are also a great opportunity to review the original job description and determine if that has changed at all and adjust accordingly. As families grow and circumstances change, so does the job description.
Reviews. In addition to reviewing your employee’s performance, a great tool is to do a self-evaluation on your role as an employer. They should do the same. As we mentioned, setting up the meeting a week ahead will allow both of you to complete an evaluation and bring it to the meeting. When you are all in the meeting, this is where you’ll want to go over the evaluations to see each other’s strengths and weaknesses and work together to come up with solutions. Once you are in the meeting you will want to be sure to go over each area and point out strengths as well as areas that may need improvement. Once you have a plan together that everyone is happy with, set a time to touch base to ensure all is working as discussed or if further clarification is needed.
If the performance review is done annually, this is a great time to consider and discuss a raise for your employee. Monetary raises are ideal however, some look for more benefits as well. If you are not able to provide a monetary increase, consider perks such as additional PTO, or contributions to health insurance or retirement – both of these provide valuable tax benefits to you and your employee.
Once you’ve completed the review, be sure to update any contract/work agreement to reflect the changes, and provide a signed and dated copy of the review to your employee. Keep a copy for yourself, as we mentioned these can come into play should you need to terminate your employee at any time.
The Washburn Agency is here to answer any of your questions when it comes to performance reviews or any other issues or concerns you may have. We’re here to ensure you are happy and confident in your role as an employer.
