Top 20 Questions To Ask Staff in a Supervisor Evaluation

An overview of supervisor evaluation emphasizing how to conduct it, relevant questions to ask & how to deliver feedback.

May 2, 2023
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How would you describe your job to a five year old?
What season would you be?
What is a weird food you have tried? Would you eat it again?
What is your favorite holiday tradition?
Would you go in the mother-ship with aliens if they landed on Earth tomorrow?
What is your favorite season?
Do prefer working from home or the office?
What is your earliest memory of this job?
What is the best thing you have bought so far this year?
What is the earliest book you remember?
If you had to move to another country, which one would you choose?
You are the best criminal mastermind in the world. What crime would you commit if you knew you would get away with it?
What is your favorite movie genre to watch?
What was the last thing you ate?
What person from history would you add to Mount Rushmore?
What is a weird fact you know?
What is your favorite part of working from home?
Were the Spice Girls a good team?
Imagine you can instantly learn any language. Which would you choose?
If you could live in any state, which state would you pick?
Which fictional team is the best team of all time?
What did you want to be when you grew up?
What do you usually eat for a quick lunch?
What simple food will you never eat?
Show us the weirdest thing you have in the room with you right now.
Would you rather stay at a hotel or an AirBNB?
What is your favorite movie genre to watch?
Are you more productive in the morning or at night?
Who is someone in your community that makes a difference?
Who was your most unique pet?
Choose one famous person from history you want on your team during a zombie apocalypse.
What is a good way to give back to the community?
Which song could you listen to over and over again?
Is Hugh Grant funny?
What is your favorite thing to eat for breakfast?
Would you want to have an imaginary friend today? Did you have one as a child?
What actor or actress would you want to play you in the movie about your life?
What is the best super power?
What is your New Years resolution?
You can only eat one food again for the rest of your life. What is it?
What is the best work holiday?
What is the first gift you remember receiving?
Would you rather join Metallica or Backstreet Boys?
What is the best example of a community you have seen?
What is an easy way to do something nice for someone?
Show us your phone background and tell the story behind why you picked this image.
What was your first job?
Pick any band to play at your funeral.
If you could have an unlimited supply of one thing for the rest of your life, what would you pick?
Which superpower would you give to your arch enemy?
What is the most obscure superpower you would want?
What emoji best describes how you are feeling right now?
If you could live in any country, which country would you pick?
Would you rather live in a city or a town?
What is your favorite holiday?
What is something you accomplished as part of a team?
What is your standard office lunch?
What is your most used phone app?
What is your favorite season?
Have you ever won something as a team?
Imagine you are a professional baseball player. What is your introduction song?
Beach holiday or ski trip?
Have you ever been to a funny comedy show?
Would you rather live at the North Pole or the South Pole?
What is your favorite song to sing?
If you could live in any state, which state would you pick?
Imagine you could teleport anywhere. Where would you go right now?
What is the most unusual job you have heard of?
What was the last thing you ate?
You can visit any fictional time or place. Which would you pick?
What do your family and friends think you do all day?
What movie do you wish you could watch again for the first time?
Show us your most-used emoji.
What was the most unique style or fashion trend you ever embraced?
What movie defined your generation?
You are stranded on a remote desert island. Are you alone or with your worst enemy?
What is your favorite knock-knock joke?
Have you ever told someone Santa is not real?
Do you know how to speak more than one language?
On a scale of 1 – 10, how much of a team player are you?
What is your #1 recommendation in this city?
What is your favorite holiday?
What bucket list item do you most want to check off in the next six months?
What is your favorite mythical creature?
What was the first way you made money?
If you could be great at any Olympic sport, which would it be?
Which song could you listen to over and over again?
When did you start liking/hating mushrooms?
Where is your favorite vacation spot?
Do you take your PTO all at one time, or another way?
Which show do you remember most from your childhood?
Which beverage goes best with pizza?
Would you want to have a personal assistant follow you around everywhere and do what you asked of them?
Have you ever met your idol?
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Would you rather live 100 years in the past or 100 years in the future?
What is your hobby?
When you are alone in the car, what volume is the music at?
Imagine you no longer have to work. How would you spend a Tuesday?
What is your favorite type of sandwich?

The competence level of staff in an organization is often the yardstick for measuring meaningful contribution to the success of that company. And a performance evaluation is an effective tool to assess the expertise and capabilities of your workforce.

While it's typical for managers to evaluate employees, it's essential to have avenues to ask a manager questions that assess their performance. The management will lead better if they receive timely feedback on the company's performance from employees, increasing productivity and employee satisfaction. 

In this article, we'll discuss supervisor evaluations and explore the top 20 questions to ask a supervisor in an evaluation. 

Let's get started!

How do you evaluate a supervisor?

You evaluate a supervisor by asking the right questions and intently listening to the answers. With this, you can get a good idea of how well your supervisor fulfills their responsibilities and provide feedback to help them succeed. 

Here are five things to consider when assessing a supervisor: 

Make the process confidential.

Honest feedback is typically not gotten when there's a possibility of reprisal from the evaluators, knowing who the responses came from.

Employees fully express their reservations when organizations protect their identity.

Inquire about challenges.

By asking relevant questions about employee progress, career growth, challenges and setbacks, you can identify issues about work processes, tension among employees, and restrictions due to personal shortcomings. In addition, a supervisor evaluation provides an opportunity to obtain employees' input on addressing these issues.

Find out what's working.

In addition to evaluating the supervisor's personality, you should review their performance in the role - what they're doing right and growth opportunities. Often, there's no need to fix what isn't broken - just find a way to improve it. So, it's essential to find out what's going well and decipher ways to help it remain that way.

Take necessary action.

Lingering issues are detrimental to a company's success. Once the company identifies and defines challenges, they should be addressed immediately. Addressing challenges can range from improving the management onboarding process, offering leadership coaching to supervisors, doing performance reviews, optimizing the company values and welfare packages, etc.

Taking timely action shows that the opinions of employees are highly valued. It also builds trust in the organization's leadership.

Follow up.

Supervisor evaluation is an active process, and employees play vital roles in achieving the outcomes of this process. 

Following the execution of an action plan, surveys that help the company see improvements in the manager's performance should be regular sessions.

What Questions Would You Ask To Evaluate A Manager's Performance?

The right questions can make all the difference in gathering valuable information and insights during the performance review questions or a supervisor evaluation questions. Appropriately managing organizations attracts and retains top talents with less difficulty. Hence they perform better than their counterparts competing for these top talents.

To have positive interactions and enhance working relationships in the team, addressing negative actions to produce positive outcomes is expedient. And to prevent engagement decline, it's best to craft the questions to ask your supervisor to address specific actions.

Every manager is different, and while it's impossible to draft questions that apply to every evaluation, some questions serve as a general guide. 

Let's explore them!

Feedback questions to evaluate a manager's performance should cover four key areas of the performance review and assessment:

  1. Supervisory functions.
  2. Effective communication.
  3. Maintaining a positive work environment.
  4. Work habits.

1. Supervisory functions.

  • Does your manager promote teamwork and good working relationships?
  • Does your manager delegate authority appropriately?
  • Is your leader actively involved in your training and development?
  • Is there a clear sense of purpose, direction, roles and responsibilities for you individually and the department?
  • Are concerns identified and dealt with timely?

2. Effective communication.

  • Does your leader ask and acknowledge inputs and ideas from team members?
  • Does the manager communicate openly and honestly with employees?
  • Do you receive open and constructive feedback?
  • Are you constantly informed of your work status and updates in the organisation?
  • Are the metrics used to measure your performance thoroughly explained?

3. Maintenance of a positive work environment.

  • Are you positively motivated?
  • Are team-supportive actions recognized and rewarded?
  • Does your team manager handle conflicts effectively?
  • Does your team leader encourage innovation?
  • Is your work atmosphere conducive yet efficient?

4. Work ethics.

  • Is your manager tactful and resourceful?
  • Is there efficient use of time in the team?
  • Does your manager maintain a positive work attitude?
  • Does your manager demonstrate a good work ethic?
  • Does your team lead demonstrate empathy?

How Do You Give Good Feedback To Your Supervisor?

Honest employee feedback really is the gift that keeps giving. While there's no one-size-fits-all, there are some general rules of thumb when providing feedback to your supervisor.

Some tips include the following:

Be clear and concise

Good feedback is straightforward and devoid of sentiments. It's entirely based on facts and observations, highlighting positives and negatives. It reflects authenticity and confidence in your opinion.

It's essential to point out the required changes and the impact these changes will have on the overall company's outputs. This makes the evaluation process productive and you gain valuable feedback too.

Say positive words

Although your detailed feedback to your supervisor typically highlights aspects of leadership you find unsatisfactory, good feedback should begin with appreciative words. Begin by acknowledging the support and efforts put in so far by your supervisor.

Starting positively makes the receiving party more receptive to your observations.

Ask questions

Giving feedback in the form of questions is an excellent performance management strategy. This technique lets you focus on specific actions, making the session more conversational. A response shows that the question is well understood and the management can proffer a solution quicker.

Therefore, make the feedback bidirectional by also evaluating your own performance issues. Ask questions about specific aspects of your work performance. It's a way of letting them know you hold their opinion highly and are open to criticism.

You can go a step further by carrying out self-evaluation. Assembly has the ultimate self-evaluation guide. Check it out.

Be sincere

Being honest and professional makes the evaluation effective. Avoid playing down how you truly feel about certain situations for fear of being disliked. 

Instead, find ways to be sincere without being disrespectful. Constantly being dishonest prevents appropriate actions, and the challenge will persist.

Criticize constructively

Be constructive when pointing out the negative aspects of your team's leadership. A constructive approach focuses on solutions rather than challenges. 

It indicates that the positive feedback aims to improve the team's effectiveness, not just complaining.

What is constructive feedback for a supervisor?

Constructive feedback is an assessment that helps the recipient improve outputs and produce better outcomes. If feedback doesn't induce positive corrective results, it's not constructive. 

Constructive feedback in performance evaluation is a core step in fostering a productive work culture. It's the key to improving team morale and boosting the whole company culture's productivity while keeping expectations and the tone of delivery polite and reassuring.

Giving feedback constructively requires a combination of a solution-oriented mindset and empathetic communication skills. It must be a less critical and more comprehensive list of possible solutions.

Possessing a good knowledge of how to deliver highly resourceful reviews by employees helps improve the manager's job performance and the workforce's productivity

 Nurturing a Workplace That Thrives on Feedback

A supervisor evaluation fulfils two crucial requirements for a company's success: prioritizing employees and improving the manager's performance. Therefore, feedback from employees is honest and regular. 

According to a recent report by Gallup, managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. Only a manager that's open to constructive criticism improves. A listening manager quickly identifies where to improve the team's productivity level.

So, rather than having a work culture which discourages employees from highlighting key observations about team leadership, it's best to cultivate and nurture a work atmosphere where employees can provide valuable feedback in real-time and do it without fear of rebuke.

Use Assembly to optimize supervisor evaluation. Assembly empowers employees to provide feedback in real-time. Book a free demo today.

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