Let’s start with the less-than-awesome news.
Employee performance metrics are not like spatulas, handbags or fancy clip-on bow ties. One size does not fit all. In fact, employee performance metrics share a lot more similarities with bespoke suits and finicky floating shelves – it’s something very personal that only really works when it’s tailor-made for its exact application.In short – it’s very important to track team member performance in a way that makes sense for your business in particular.
Dedicated employees require feedback to help them grow within your company and reach their career goals. It also just makes good business sense to keep track of what’s cooking within your enterprise as a whole.
However, this is much easier said than done. Measuring a moving target like productivity can be challenging, especially when you’re dealing with different departments chasing different goals while working from different spaces.
Sales, marketing, support and HR all have different goals that they need to achieve, which means you can’t measure a member of one team with the proverbial ruler that has been tailored for the other.
Read more: 9 Ways to boost employee productivity in your workplace
The trick lies in getting down to brass tax by getting back to basics.
Here are 6 employee performance metrics that will take the pain out of providing user-friendly performance evaluations that allow your employees to grow into their best selves at work.
1. Showing up
Taking attendance can feel a lot like a grade school tactic, but this is one of the basic requirements for productivity. Regular absenteeism and all-too-frequent sick days can cost your company a lot of revenue in terms of time lost, but it also impacts on the ability of the rest of the team to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
Taking heed of poor attendance records can also help you to pinpoint issues that your employees may have – e.g. health concerns or burnout. If this happens frequently to more than one person in a given department, it may point towards staffing issues and overwork, which have to be addressed if productivity is to flourish.
Read more: People analytics and your business strategy. Here’s what you need to know
2. Efficiency and time management
If your business is to operate efficiently, your employees should be able to stick to deadlines and complete their work on time. This requires a firm handle on time limitations, prioritisation, as well as making the most of the resources available to them. Make a point of addressing missed deadlines, as well as large amounts of overtime, which indicates that certain team members may require assistance with time management.
This metric is especially applicable at a time when more teams are collaborating remotely than ever before. If your business has been forced to have certain members work from home to adhere to COVID-19 social distancing measures, you may find that efficiency and time management is something that may have to be addressed more frequently as employees adjust to the new normal. Stay empathetic and be ready to offer advice and guidance in this regard.
Read more: How to motivate remote employees who are new to distance collaboration
3. Willingness to go the extra mile
Helpfulness may seem like quite a slippery metric to measure, but it’s important enough to make a little extra effort. The simplest way to measure it would be to conduct regular peer-on-peer surveys that include questions pertaining to the willingness of colleagues to go the extra mile. If your company uses an employee engagement platform like bountiXP then it becomes easy to send and receive messages of thanks, praise, appreciation and support, you can also glean this data from there. Find out more by signing up for a free trial.
4. Quality of work
Work quality can be measured at the hand of appraisals by an employee’s immediate superior, as well as 360-degree and 180-degree feedback from peers, customers, managers, and subordinates. This type of appraisal should be done at least twice a year, although monthly feedback is actually best. The more regularly your team is given the opportunity to correct their course, the more productive they are likely to be.
5. Quantity of work
Work quantity is a numbers game, and the measurement thereof should be closely tailored to the type of output expected from each department within a given business. For instance, sales personnel performance could be measured at the hand of call volume, sales per rep, revenue per sales rep, lead-to-win conversion rate and average selling price. Marketing team member productivity, on the other hand, could be measured according to website sessions, new marketing qualified leads, lead conversion rate, customer acquisition cost and return on marketing investment.
6. Taking initiative
Initiative is yet another metric that can be a little hard to put into a spreadsheet, but is important enough that it has to be factored. Whether you choose to assign managers the task of keeping tabs of it manually, or use an app like bountiXP to make it a little simpler, is up to you. Employees who take initiative to contribute to the efficiency and productivity of their teams over and above what is expected of them, points to healthy engagement and satisfaction levels. This is vital in growing businesses and rapidly changing workplaces.
Keeping tabs on these performance evaluation metrics is a surefire way to stay on track when it comes to productivity, employee engagement and more. Check back soon for more of the good stuff – the bountiXP team is standing by to share expert insight on everything from employee performance metrics, to data-driven annual performance reviews, and more.
Are you ready to take your staff’s engagement levels to new heights with our employee recognition software? Try bountiXP for FREE.