5 Ways to Measure Employee Performance

You're focused on the big picture of your company's success, but it takes examining the smaller details of your individual employees' contributions to track the incremental progress towards your larger goals. Here are five methods for tracking employee performance, ranging everywhere from objective to subjective.

Attendance

A simple question: is your employee showing up for work? This might appear to be very simple, but it is also one of the most objective measures you can use to evaluate a worker. Managers set expectations for when and where their employees will be completing their tasks. Absenteeism doesn't just affect the individual in question's performance. Excessive tardiness or absences can impede other employees' abilities to function properly and erode trust and morale.

Productivity 

Sales per quarter. Blog posts per month. Lead generation. Any overall company goal can be broken down to determine an employee's individual contribution compared to their colleagues' contributions. This objective measure of job performance works best in scenarios where there is uniformity across a set of employees. Call centers provide a great example, where all sales associates have the same tools and the same tasks - productivity can be easily measured and compared.

Self-Determined Goals

A more flexible approach to measuring productivity, self-determined goals are the result of communication between an employee and their supervisor. At regular intervals, the two will meet and establish a set of mutually agreed upon benchmarks that the employee will achieve over a period of time. Self-determined goals can be evaluated monthly, quarterly, annually... Anything goes in this system, as long as it is the result of a documented mutual understanding.

360 Review

This contemporary approach to evaluation was first used in business in the 1950's by Esso Research and Engineering but gained momentum when Jack Welch implemented it at General Electric in the 1980's. This method gathers feedback from as many relevant sources as possible in determining the quality of an employee's performance. Customers, colleagues, managers, and direct reports all have an opportunity to weigh in, and the evaluator then analyzes the aggregate data.

Subjective Review

This is a classic approach that is well-suited to the hands-on manager. The supervisor using this method knows the ins-and-outs of all of their employees' activities and can make a competent evaluation based on first-hand knowledge. The trickiest part of a subjective review is that recent studies show this method, in many cases, actually reveals more about a manager's strengths, weaknesses, and biases than it does the person being evaluated. 

No matter the method, employees can't grow without regularly scheduled, structured feedback. You have to choose the right solutions for your business, but when it comes to choosing a payroll services provider, no one can beat Future Systems. Contact us today to learn more!