How to Track Employee Performance the Right Way

Tracking employee performance can be one of the best ways to determine if your employees are performing their job duties well. Tracking allows you to analyze the efficiency, effectiveness, and work quality of your employees.

Employee performance evaluations provide helpful reviews of worker performance over a specified period of time. These evaluations identify areas where an employee is excelling as well as aspects where they need improvement.

Not sure how to track employee performance? Here are some tips to help.

1. Set Goals

Measuring is the key to success. Before you set out to improve your employee performance, you must have an idea of what it looks like in your company’s context. If you do not have well-defined and measurable performance goals, it will be tricky to track their performance.

For starters, come up with the primary strategic priorities and rely on a goal-setting framework to set goals that are clear, measureable, and actionable. These frameworks include:

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  KPIs refer to quantifiable measures, such as how much revenue an employee generates or what their capacity utilization rate is. They are terrific when it comes to comparing how an employee performs on an annual, quarterly, or monthly basis. These KPIs need to be meaningful and relevant to your company’s mission. To identify meaningful KPIs that align with your company’s needs, send us a message. Our experts can help you create indicators that work for your business.
• Objective and Key Result (OKRs)
  OKRs are quarterly or monthly goals that are shared openly and prioritized within a company. A standard OKR strategy is to focus on three to five high-priority objectives. Each of these objectives have 3-5 measurable results that align with the overall objective.
• SMART GOALS
  These refer to Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely goals you specify for your company. These must be contextualized effectively to prevent them from turning into irrelevant or vague ideals.

2. Use Employee Monitoring Software

Employee monitoring software is created to monitor productivity metrics and boost efficiency. This type of software is not a form of micromanaging. On the contrary, it prevents micromanaging by providing a transparent and clear way of tracking your employees using stated tasks or activities. This software allows employees to assess their work output and personal productivity. The software also offers managers tangible and real examples of high performance as well as a list of areas to improve.

This software removes bias and there is also no need to send out outdated criteria questionnaires. Now, you can continually evaluate your employees and encourage them to increase their productivity and make adjustments in areas that need improvement.

3. Arrange 1:1 Meetings

Proper monitoring of employee performance begins by including regular 1-on-1 meetings. Managers have a key roles in helping employee improve performance. Standup meetings are a proven way for supervisors to build rapport, provide frequent training, integrate organic recognition, and gather process improvement suggestions from employees.

Once supervisors begin to regularly check in with their team members, they will have a better idea of how ongoing projects are progressing. They will be able to better track engagement levels, and more easily assist in improving employee productivity.

Supporting direct engagement with data-generated recommendations (collected from employee monitoring reports) enables managers to state their expectations clearly and effectively.

4. Monitor Only a Few Employees

Selective control lets managers track employee performance without making it seem as if they are watching the staff all the time. The monitoring is performed randomly in a natural work environment. This allows the manager to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an employee. However, this strategy has some drawbacks. At times, instead of keeping the staff sharp, it builds a problematic and stressful environment and even lowers the team’s morale.

Some employees complain that this monitoring type is subjective and can appear like the manager is searching for employee faults.

5. Ask Around a Little

Collect intelligence. Reach out to co-workers, vendors, customers, and other managers to learn about how your employees interact. Make sure that you focus on your employee’s work, not on their personal life or qualities. Keep in mind that not everything you hear should be treated as the truth. However, over time, you will learn who can trust.

6. Implement a Time Tracking System

Time tracking tools are used to monitor how much work your employees do during the hours they are working. Assuming your workers are not procrastinating and are busy in work, this is a good way to find out which of your projects and tasks are taking the most time as well as areas where your employees could be more productive.

7. Chart Task Completion

If you are using a task assignment or project management system, it is easy to measure how many tasks your employees have completed or how many are still on their to do list. For instance, if you find that an employee closed 20 tickets in the whole month during morning, but only 7 tickets in the afternoon hours, it means that there might be a loss of motivation or energy after lunch.

Final Thoughts

Your employees are your organization’s most valuable asset and they are the leading contributors to your success. Closely tracking their performance is crucial for your organization’s success. Smart employee tracking gives a clear picture of how employees perform and ensure your stays on the right track.

So, what are your thoughts on tracking employee performance? Would you like to learn about more strategies? Get in touch with us today.