Managers regularly evaluate the performance of their employees. These performance evaluations involve paperwork and approvals by various parties, including employees, managers and higher-level personnel. Here is how a sheriff’s office made daily performance observations of probationary deputies fully paperless with Laserfiche Forms.

Daily Observation Report

In order to make sure that new sheriff’s deputies are proficient in their jobs, observing their performance is crucial. During the probationary deputy’s field training, a field training deputy (FTD) evaluates him daily.

Instead of manually filling out a paper form at the end of each workday, the FTD now logs into the sheriff’s intranet from the office or his patrol car to access a Daily Observation Report created in Laserfiche Forms.

The FTD fills out the form, rates the probationary deputy in a number of categories and indicates whether the deputy needs additional training (A.T.) in any particular category. If additional training is required, a new field appears on the form asking for more details about this training.

If additional training isn’t required, the field remains hidden.

After the FTD submits the form, an email with a link to the form is sent to the probationary deputy. The deputy can make changes to the form and add comments before submitting.

Once the probationary deputy submits the form, the FTD supervisor is notified by email that he has a new Daily Observation Form to approve.

The FTD supervisor can click the link or log into Laserfiche Forms and go to “My Tasks” to view the form.

He cannot make any changes to the form, but can add his own comments and approve or reject the form. If approved, the form is sent to the FTD coordinator for review and approval. Like the FTD supervisor, the FTD coordinator cannot make changes to the form, except to add comments at the end.

After review by the FTD coordinator, the completed form is routed to a specific folder in the Laserfiche repository for storage.

What is going on in the background

This entire business process is enabled by Laserfiche Forms. The form is designed in the Form Designer.

In order to create the dynamic fields—so that a field appears if additional training is selected—the sheriff’s office used custom JavaScript code that can be added in the “CSS and JavaScript” page when creating a form.

This code relies on the presence of the “addTraining”CSS class on the Additional Training field. Be sure to add the appropriate CSS class to your fields or the code won’t work. More information can be found in the Laserfiche Forms online help files.

It is possible to create the dynamic fields without code on the “Field Rules” page, but since that would require one rule per radio button, in this case JavaScript is more efficient.

The whole process is mapped out in the Laserfiche Forms Process Modeler.

The process begins when the FTD fills out the form. Reviewers are notified via email when the form is ready for review. This email is configured in the “Notifications” tab of the User Task settings dialog box. To customize this email, the sheriff’s office added the name of the probationary deputy as a variable.

After the form is reviewed, Laserfiche Forms routes it to its final storage place in the Laserfiche repository. A Save to Repository service task is used to specify the location in Laserfiche where the file will be stored along with the template and fields that should be assigned to it.

Benefits of Laserfiche Forms

Some benefits of automating the employee performance evaluation process with Laserfiche Forms include:

• Since forms can be filled out on mobile devices, evaluations can easily be completed in the field and immediately submitted for review.
• Performance evaluations get processed quickly since they can be reviewed and approved even when a reviewer is out of the office.
• The process is transparent to everyone involved. Both the manager and employee can view a copy of the evaluation by simply logging into Laserfiche Forms.