How to Track Employee Performance the Right Way

One of your most important functions as a business owner or manager is measuring how well your employees are doing. Are they on board with your goals and mission? You want to know they’re focusing on those objectives and meeting or exceeding your expectations.

Why It Matters

You may have heard the term "performance management" and thought it was just another business buzzword. In reality, performance management refers to everything you do that touches on your employees' work, productivity and performance. It includes everything from gathering information about your workers to analyzing their strengths and weaknesses in detail.

Where do you start? The first step is to gather objective information about how well your employees are meeting your company or department goals. That's where employee performance tracking comes in.

What Are You Doing Now?

What methods of monitoring employee performance are you currently using? Are you relying on subjective impressions of who is doing the most or best work? Your instincts are probably pretty sound, but they’re not enough. You also need facts and numbers that prove or disprove your impressions.

There are many reasons for companies to consider automating their onboarding processes. Here are four of the primary reasons companies should consider implementing an automated process.

1. Set Expectations and Goals from the Beginning

Are you guilty of passive management? If your management style involves not saying anything until there’s a problem you need to connect, you are not taking a proactive approach to managing and tracking your employees.

If they don’t know what you expect, they won’t know what to focus on first. That’s why the first step in employee performance tracking is to make your expectations clear.

What are your top strategic goals for your company or department? Sometimes, the answer is obvious. It might be sales figures, customer retention or another measurable goal. In other cases, you will need to define it for your employees. How do you track the success of a new marketing initiative or ensure that your customer service employees are unfailingly polite?

Try to make your goals clear and, when possible, measurable in numbers. Remember the acronym SMART: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. It helps your employees know what to strive for, and it gives you a baseline for measuring each worker’s performance.

2. Monitor Productivity Using Employee Performance Tracking Software

Once you know what your goals and expectations are, use software to monitor how well your employees are meeting those goals. With employee monitoring software, you can evaluate their personal productivity and the quantity of work they produce.

You’ll also be able to spot what type of work they excel at and where their weaknesses are. You’ll have clear, objective numbers that show you which areas of performance are strong and which could use improvement.

Use self-monitoring along with regular performance reviews and meetings. They’ll give you employees a better sense of where they stand. Your performance reviews and other meetings will be quick and to the point, and that’s something everyone will appreciate.

3. Encourage Quality Over Quantity

When you track numbers, be sure you track the right ones. The quality of an employee’s work product is more important than the number of hours they work or even whether they have perfect attendance. Those factors are important, but don’t let them overshadow the value of specific achievements. Instead of tracking each employee’s schedule, track the tasks they finish and the projects they successfully complete.

Use 360-degree feedback to get information about intangible skills. So-called soft skills are critical to your success and growth as a company. Use the 360-degree method to collect feedback from an employee’s colleagues, subordinates, customers and managers in other departments. You’ll get a strong sense of the employee’s skills at problem solving, goal setting, character, leadership and teamwork.

4. Use Self-Monitoring to Track Performance

Your oversight and management are important, but self-monitoring can keep employees engaged in their own growth. Self-monitoring lets them set their own goals and track their progress. That’s enormously helpful, especially if your company links good performance to specific rewards like bonuses and awards. Employees who have a stake in meeting your organization’s goals are more likely to be highly productive.

Your employees can measure how well they’re doing on certain projects using activity logs, task lists and project milestones. Self-monitoring tools help them develop ownership of their work.

Employee Performance Tracking Software is Essential

What’s the best way to track performance? Most employee files contain performance reviews, awards, letters of commendation and other paperwork. This isn’t really sufficient, and it’s a time-consuming way to measure how well your workers are performing.

You can use software to track employee performance in the metrics that really matter, like time spent on tasks, deadlines met, application use and internet activity.

Of all the methods of monitoring employee performance, web-based solutions are the fastest, most thorough and most objective. Task management software integrates with the software your employees are already using to measure their work output, attendance, production and more. If you want the clearest, fairest employee performance tracking, task management software is the solution.

Main features your Employee Performance Tracking Software needs:

1. Straightforward success metrics: employee performance tracking systems should enable the ability to determine how much progress and employee has made by providing easy-to-understand success metrics.
2. Easy to understand, automated, and intuitive process: a valuable performance tracker system provides a smooth and intuitive user experience, giving automatic prompts and reminders so no tasks is left incomplete.
3. Integrated 360-degree feedback: 360-degree feedback is a great tool to evaluate employees and let them know where they stand. A great performance software will allow to obtain feedback from people electronically and optimize this process, opposed to having to sit down with each person providing feedback.
4. Self-evaluation monitoring tools: a good performance system allows employees to perform self-evaluations periodically, letting them recognize areas to improve, take ownership of actions and growth, and having a more visual representation of their current state in the company.
5. Manager-only log: the right software enables managers to keep regular logs of how employees are performing, allowing them to have easy to access information on the employee no reference when needed.

Talk to Chetu About Employee Performance Tracking Software

When you need powerful, easy-to-use performance tracking, contact Chetu. We have extensive experiencing building web-based management software. With employee appraisals, custom performance reviews, 360-degree feedback, bonus and award reports, employee engagement tracing, review cycle tracking and compensation included in one software platform, we make it easy to streamline your performance management.

When you need software that powers your business, you need Chetu. Contact us today to learn more about our business-focused solutions.