Employee performance is something your organisation probably cares a lot about. Employees are essential to an organisation's productivity, profitability and ultimately, success, and those results are not going to happen without stellar employee performance. But just caring about employee performance does not mean that your company understands the idea, has an efficient process of performance management, or knows how to improve employee performance. Performance tracking is not easy to navigate because it is continuously evolving. Each year, new trends in performance management emerge, and all too often, departments of human resources get it wrong. Employees are left feeling deflated, unmotivated and unengaged, and managers are frustrated by the poor team and individual performance levels of employees.
The good thing is that more and more organisations are waking up to the importance of effective performance management systems and the resulting benefits. The first step to revitalising and enhancing the existing performance processes is to understand what an efficient performance management system is. Tracking employee performance is critical to ensuring that your organisation works effectively and meets its strategic objectives. If your organisation wishes to control and optimise employee performance efficiently, you need to recognise the role that your employees play in achieving the goals of the organisation and incorporate the necessary resources and procedures to monitor and help them.
Employee performance monitoring is important to ensure that your organisation works effectively and meets its strategic goals. If your organisation wants to monitor and enhance employee performance effectively, you need to understand the role that your employees play in meeting the goals of the organisation and implement the appropriate tools and practices to monitor and support them. Employee performance tracking is important to ensure that your organisation works effectively and meets its strategic goals. If your organisation wants to monitor and enhance employee performance effectively, you need to understand the role that your employees play in meeting the goals of the organisation and implement the appropriate tools and practices to monitor and support them.
What is Employee Performance?
The performance of employees is the measurement of how well an employee performs on explicit and implicit standards, objectives, and priorities. The performance of employees is not binary. It is not only good or bad:
- Yes, you met the goals,
- Nope, you missed the goal.
Employee performance falls on a scale with lots of grey shades. Any other way to view performance oversimplifies employee contributions and dismisses real-life conditions. Since employees have different roles and responsibilities, the performance of employees will look different for each employee. A huge but not the only part of employee performance is setting and verbalising the correct objectives and expectations.
The performance of employees is about much more than meeting the numerical objective set at the beginning of the year. Did the employee embody your organisation's values? Was he a good teammate or her? Did the worker function effectively? Did he or she show financial savvy or strategic thinking? Numeric objectives ignore all the other ways in which an employee influenced the success of the organisation to assess performance only on stated objectives. It is no surprise that employers are constantly chasing a better understanding and measurement of employee performance as a concept so critical to organisational success. This effort to accurately capture the performance of employees has resulted in as many measurement techniques as unique businesses; in other words, there are many different ways to measure the performance of employees. Various scales, various metrics, various objectives. But it does not matter in the end.
While it is all good and good to measure employee performance, in the end, measurement alone can do nothing to increase performance. Think back to those middle-school report cards you got. Sure, getting an A or F tells your parents how you are doing in your social studies classes at the moment. But those grades could not tell if you understood the Boston Tea Party's causes. The same applies here: a performance measurement-only process can tell you the current state of your employees, but it cannot do much more than that. Most businesses have moved beyond basic performance measurement strictly goal tracking to realise this and adopted the notion of performance management. Performance management is a process that aims to enhance employee performance, not just measure it.
Key benefits of tracking employee performance
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The following are some of the benefits of tracking employee performance:
- Improves the efficiency of workflows – you will have no difficulty streamlining workflows because you will have the right people and the right procedures in place to ensure that things always run smoothly. Thus, you will be able to:
- Hire the employees with the right skill set for your tasks.
- Easily monitor their activities to ensure things are moving well.
- Effectively communicate with them to ensure that they understand project demands.
- Congratulate and encourage them on the good work they have done to motivate them further.
- Step ineffectively when things aren’t going according to plan.
- Boosts employee’s productivity and motivation - An employee feeling unappreciated would feel indifferent to their job. That is why it will dramatically boost employee morale to make the employees feel respected. An employee management system allows you to communicate on a personal level with your employee and get their input about different company practices and processes. This makes them trust that when making business decisions, their views are respected and taken into account. This, in turn, enhances the commitment of workers as they now feel like they have a say in the company!
- Ensures the security of your data - Only in certain sectors such as financial services, law, businesses investing heavily in R&D and so on, where data protection is paramount, was this aspect previously relevant. With the rise of virtual teams, however, this is becoming significant in all industries that have a remote workforce. Every day, most organisations handle loads of substantial and sensitive data. And how can you make sure that those important documents and files stay safe? By controlling and handling the workers carefully! A good management system for employees will help you keep track of records and other material. It ties each employee to the records for which they are liable and eliminates data processing inefficiencies. That way, you will no longer have to worry about the protection of your data!
- Lower employee costs - One of the most costly costs that most organisations undertake is employee turnover. The average cost of replacing a salaried employee is 6 to 9 months of their annual pay, according to a CAP report. To put that in perspective, you'll have to spend $20,000 to $30,000 on hiring and training costs if you're trying to replace a boss making $40,000 annually! Luckily, with this, employee engagement will help. Remember, good management of workers results in satisfied, more motivated employees. This way, with their work, they'll be more driven and happy. And they're less likely to leave when the workers are happy at work!
How do you track and evaluate employee performance?
An evaluation of employee performance is an important metric that shows the capabilities of all employees for a given period. Thus, the areas where an employee does great and the areas that need improvement will be presented by such estimates. Usually, managers perform one detailed estimate once a year, with several brief check-ins during the year. These are the major benefits or advantages of an employee performance assessment:
- It gives employees a clearer understanding of what they need to do.
- It provides workers with feedback; thus, they will know how to boost their performance.
- When having thorough reports, managers will be able to review both employees’ strengths and weaknesses in the workplace.
- Managers can make precise decisions regarding an employee’s raise, promotion, compensation plan, and bonuses, but layoffs as well.
Another reason for carrying out such estimates is to make sure that your employees are reliable. Around 30% of employees have lied to their boss at least once, according to the survey published by the workspace transparency website Comparably. This research gathered 23,299 responses from employees working in small, medium-sized, and large businesses. Your employees are more trustworthy than those in this survey, we are sure. However, let us take a look at how you can assess the performance of your employees. Performance tracking has evolved quite a lot since the idea of employee performance first entered the collective consciousness. It began in the early 1800s. The Industrial Revolution is driving large numbers of people from farms to factories. First, the notion of management enters into collective thinking. The following are the steps for the process of employee performance tracking:
Determine performance standards and individual goals
You need to establish performance norms as a manager for this you can look at using a Leading Balanced Scorecard Software. Such expectations include a set of rules that all workers need to obey. For example, each worker should be aware of his or her responsibilities and what he or she needs to fulfil, depending on their position in the team. For your team, be sure to set achievable standards. Furthermore, for all employees working in the same position, these standards must be the same. Setting specific objectives is also important, aside from performance standards. In this case, for each employee, you should create individual objectives. Maybe you are wondering how to do that. Here's how: with each worker, discuss this topic and you will be able to discover the objectives that are rational and appropriate for their position.
Monitor their performance throughout the year
When you need to make use of your organizational skills, this is the step. You need to collect the data all year long to create a precise annual employee performance assessment. Here is what we're proposing:
- Start by making a performance file for each employee.
- Whenever a worker completes a task or makes a mistake, be sure to write it down. Remember to give your employee honest feedback regularly, in line with this rule. This is going to improve worker morale.
You will not miss any valuable data by constantly keeping track of the performance of an employee. Plus, it would be a much easier task for you to make an annual report.
Be careful with criticism
Be honest while doing that, if you have to express your criticism in the assessment. Be straight forward and use examples. Write down all the particulars:
- The reason why your employee made a workplace mistake.
- That event's description.
- An employee's advice on what he/she can do to fix this problem.
Without exaggerations or under-estimations, you need to remain rational and speak the truth. Your employee will therefore be more likely to come clean and try to solve an issue.
Assess only their work
Target your focus only on their work, not their personalities, when evaluating your employees. How they perform their tasks is what matters the most. It can be harmful to employees to make accusations based on the personality of a worker. Instead, focus on their actions when analysing the work of your employees. For example, Kevin, your employee, has an impulsive personality. There was a rude customer in the store one day. Sadly, Kevin began screaming at the client, which was quite inappropriate. As a manager, your employee needs to have a serious conversation with him. But, instead of blaming his impulsive nature, tell him that in the workplace, disrespectful behaviour is not acceptable. This way, in a specific situation, you will criticise only his actions, not his temper.
Communicate with your employees
You need to listen to their needs, too, to be able to make correct assessments of your employees. Communicate often with the members of your team. Remember, it is truly important to receive feedback from your employees. You can ask your employees some questions here:
- Do you have any career concerns?
- What do you need to achieve your goals (your colleagues or your manager's support, some resources)?
- How frequently do you want to get feedback from me?
- In your career, do you have any long-term objectives? How can our business help you accomplish these objectives?
Getting answers to these questions will help you understand if your employees have any problems in the workplace, which might slow them down, but also their performance.
Introduce employee performance evaluations properly
Once you have completed your assessments, presenting them to your employees should be the next step. We suggest that you set up a meeting with each employee. Review the evaluation one more time before the meeting starts. Pick the most important parts of that assessment, both positive and negative marks. But, remember to focus on bringing up the report's positive sides. Finally, let the workers know how to enhance their efficiency in the future. Evaluating the output of workers in an office environment can be very easy since you share the same workspace and also interact with employees. But what happens when the output of workers working from home has to be analysed? In the next part, we'll cover this subject.
How do you monitor employees working from home?
You'll know how busy they are if you assess your workers working from home. You would, therefore, be able to assign their workload accordingly. Here's how it can be done.
Encourage employees to track their time
Encouraging them to use the basic clock-in clock-out method is one of the most efficient ways to track workers working from home. Therefore, you will know how they spend their working hours and what things they are performing at the moment.
- There are some alternatives that your workers can use to monitor their hours:
- At the end of the day, they will log their hours in. You need to build a project for each worker as a boss. Then, from the project list, the workers will pick their name and log in their hours at the end of the day.
By using a timer. On their computer, employees can use a timer, start the timer at the beginning of the day, and turn it off at the end of the day. This is an excellent way to find out which employees are swamped with work and which ones are less busy.
Creating task lists
The method is very simple: you need to create a list of tasks and connect specific tasks to specific projects. Then, inside the squad, you should assign tasks. The advantage of using work lists is that you'll see if there are too many tasks for certain workers, or if someone has just a few. Therefore, you can adjust the list, so that every worker has an equal number of tasks. But, be alert, some assignments may be more difficult than others. When assigning work to the members of your team, keep that in mind. Having task lists is useful because, by monitoring your team's work, you can monitor the progress of the project.
Always set deadlines
To optimize task management, it is crucial to assign deadlines to assignments, whether through project management tools or alternative methods within your team. This practice benefits both team members and managers alike. Deadlines provide employees with the ability to plan their workdays and subsequent weeks effectively, resulting in increased productivity. By having clear deadlines, employees can avoid spending excessive time on a task and instead focus on completing it within the required timeframe. Moreover, the measurement and evaluation of their work become more reliable when deadlines are in place.
In addition to understanding how to observe and evaluate your employees effectively, you can also utilize tracking software to monitor your team's performance. Implementing such software enables you to keep track of your team's progress and accomplishments, providing valuable insights into their success. This data-driven approach aids in assessing individual and collective performance, allowing for informed decision-making and fostering overall team productivity.
Employee performance tracking software
Here are five ways of software for workforce management that will make it much simpler to handle the employees:
Performance Monitoring Tools
Tracking workers efficiently is a core aspect of employee management.
You've got to know:
- What duties they're working on
- How long they spend on each assignment
- How fruitful they are
Luckily, for this, performance management tools such as iPerform and Time Doctor were developed. Tools for performance management provide you with comprehensive reports to see how the workers spend their hours at work. Here are some of the reports produced by them:
- Report on Projects- Shows you which workers worked on what projects and for how long.
- Timesheet Report-Displays the cumulative time spent during a specified span by workers.
- Document on Web and App Usage-A description of each app and site accessed during work hours by a customer.
- Poor Time Usage Report-Highlights any unproductive apps & pages accessed during working hours by a worker.
HR Management Tools
For those looking to incorporate productive workforce management, HR management resources are another must. To streamline your HR functions and make decision-making easier, HR software lets you centralize your employee data. In one spot, applications such as Gusto and Zenefits assist you with onboarding new employees, handling payroll and benefits, and other HR tasks. You can also use Human Resources experts and HR filing templates with these applications.
Communication Tools
To ensure that their work continues smoothly, the team needs to stay in regular touch. That's why investing in an app that can help you and your team members interact efficiently is critical. Communication applications such as Slack and Fleep allow data to be exchanged and shared by your team. To streamline the contact process, these applications often provide project-specific channels and integrations with different apps.
File-Sharing Tools
One of the most important aspects of workforce management is getting all the workers on the same page. You make it easy to keep everyone aware and updated about project changes with cloud-based file sharing apps. Cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox help members of your team work together on the go. These applications can be used by the staff to share some type of file and work together on projects.
Project Management Tools
Tools for project management help you efficiently handle your tasks and personnel. To make sure that everything goes according to plan, you can redistribute tasks, delegate things and reschedule events. Applications for project management such as ClickUp and Trello allow users to build assignments, schedule projects and set deadlines to get their job done on time. To help you stay organised on the go, most of these resources even come with a smartphone app.
Employee performance is crucial to the organisation's success and, as we have seen, the performance is guided by good understanding and communication with employees. Despite common thinking, enhancing employee performance is not a one-time endeavour or program that you win; employee performance is an ongoing process of listening, adjusting, and improving incrementally. It takes profound employee understanding and dedication to work with them to motivate efficiency. Employee performance tracking is a key mechanism for every company that is trying to boost its bottom line. Know, human capital is the most valuable resource of your company. It's up to the management of the employees and the culture of the company to leverage the talent. Follow the tips and procedures we have mentioned here and you will have no difficulty turning your best employee into a good employee!
Next article: Work from home productivity tools that will change how you work
Kudzai Derera is a Consultant at Industrial Psychology Consultants (Pvt) Ltd, a management and human resources consulting firm.
LinkedIn: https://zw.linkedin.com/in/kudzaiderera
Phone: +263 242 481946-48/481950
Email: kudzai@ipcconsultants.com
Main Website: www.ipcconsultants.com