Afraid Your People Aren't Doing Their Job? 7 Ways to Track Employee Performance

With some employees working remotely, others in the office and a selection deciding on a hybrid model, it can be difficult to keep track of everyone and the tasks they’re carrying out. This can be compounded further by managers taking advantage of flexible arrangements too, meaning there’s a good chance teams are spread out across disparate locations.

Many businesses are making it work, however, and adjusting to the new reality of the modern workplace post-pandemic. The need to track employee performance has never been so great and there are various ways to go about it. Each one will have pros and cons in relation to specific organizations, but the most important thing is to find a solution that works for your business.

1. Implement goals

Goals are used effectively in many areas of your company, so why not extend their reach to your employees too? They should be established collaboratively between staff and management to ensure that an agreement is reached on what success looks like for all parties involved. Goals also shouldn’t be static, but evaluated and updated on a regular basis.

Make sure the goals you set are quantitative, as putting an ambiguous aim in place won’t benefit anyone. Employees won’t understand how to fulfill their obligations and managers won’t be able to definitely determine whether they’ve been met. Follow a goal framework like SMART or OKR to make sure they’re well-defined and measurable.

2. Harness the power of 360-degree reviews

Most employees will work with a number of people within the business and would benefit from receiving feedback from all of them. Carrying out 360-degree performance reviews is an effective way of achieving this and avoiding any bias that could occur from all evaluations being conducted by a single manager.

For the 360-degree review process to work, you must ask the right questions of the individual’s peers and management staff that come into contact with them on a day-to-day basis. These should cover topics including quality of output, time management, communication and teamwork to help establish a well-rounded picture of the employee’s performance.

3. Encourage the use of self-monitoring tools

One of the biggest obstacles to tracking employee performance is the awkward interplay of staff thinking you’re checking up on them. This can be overcome by putting the tools to monitor themselves in their own hands, allowing them to take ownership of their tasks. This approach leads to more engaged staff and an increased sense of trust.

For this to work, you need to select the right self-monitoring tools, which may mean road testing a few before deciding on the best fit for your company. Project management tools with time-tracking features can be particularly beneficial, so start your search there. Also, be sure to get input from employees on the apps and software they’re comfortable with.

4. Issue productivity scores

Benchmarking staff against each other can be incredibly difficult when they’re not in the same location, so using criteria to standardize this analysis and turn it into a score can help. That way you can identify when someone’s slipping behind more easily, but also give credit to employees that are consistently delivering every project on time.

Productivity scores should be built up over the course of multiple projects and should be applied in the same way to everyone. Being transparent about how they’re used will help staff to keep their score up, while you’ll be able to identify any anomalies that show certain types of work poses a challenge for particular employees.

5. Always set a deadline

It’s a misconception that not setting a deadline is being kind, when what you’re actually doing is making it difficult for employees to prioritize their work. Always make sure the deadlines are realistic and can be achieved in the context of other deadlines so as not to cause unnecessary stress.

Workplaces with a culture where deadlines are impossible to meet find they’re simply not taken seriously and that’s not helpful either. Deadlines not just motivate staff to start a task, but they also give an indication of when to stop, as there are often projects that could be improved on indefinitely if no cutoff date is established in advance.

6. Carry out surveys

One way to find out how staff think they’re doing is to ask them. Conducting surveys of employees to uncover their attitudes towards their roles and their performance helps to paint a picture of how they do their jobs. Not only should these surveys flag up any issues or roadblocks, they’ll give managers an idea of the satisfaction levels of employees and their overall engagement.

In order for surveys to be truly useful, they need to be carefully considered and populated with the right questions. These must be insightful but appropriate for the workplace and applied to all colleagues in a fair and consistent manner. Managers can decide whether to offer multiple choice questions, a scoring system, written answers or a combination of these approaches.

7. Shadow employees

Seeing how staff interact with customers or carry out tasks first hand is one of the best ways to fully understand how they perform. Just because someone doesn’t come into the office you don’t have to rule this option out altogether. Modern technology now offers all sorts of solutions to this hurdle, from video calls to remote-access programs.

If the specifics of a role mean this wouldn’t be possible, find a way to meet face-to-face, even if this is only once a quarter or annually. That way you can get a better understanding of the nuances of the way they go about things and bring up any issues you notice to them in person and on the spot.