Getting Started: Tracking Employee Performance Metrics

When your employees succeed, so does your company. But with so many jobs being proprietary or unique, how can you objectively measure and monitor employee performance? You can use employee performance metrics that capture work quality, quantity, efficiency, and performance related to larger organizational goals.

Employee performance metrics are a large category of unconventional metrics that aren’t always expressed in simple objective terms like key performance indicators. They are useful for assigning goals, engaging employees in performance monitoring and improvement, and aligning managers with employees regarding quantifiable or observable objectives. Many companies have yet to discover, let alone apply, employee performance metrics, so in this article, we introduce you to a few that you can use to get started.

You can use this management model to translate your organizational goals into unique and specific individual goals for each employee. They may be related to quality, quantity, or efficiency. Think about the measurable objectives that apply to each role and that align with your organizational goals. You have individual goals for which you can award points.

For example, a human resource group should be measured on factors that affect the quality of your workforce. As you learn about the number of points employees typically accumulate in their roles. You can incentivize employees to reach certain tiers more quickly. Naturally, this metric will be easier to institute for some roles than others.

This method incorporates quality metrics into your appraisal of an employee’s performance that can also be scored and made quantifiable. As a manager, you simply solicit feedback from the employee’s peers and anyone who collaborates or interacts with him or her, including customers. Capture perspectives on skill level, performance, reliability, availability, and areas for improvement.

As part of the feedback, you can request scores on a scale of 1-5 for the types of feedback you are interested in monitoring. For instance, a customer service representative could be scored on problem resolution per conversation. A simpler version of this metric is 180-degree feedback, which only involves the direct coworkers and manager(s).

This one is relatively simple, conceptually, and you can use it to capture a great deal of information for each employee. For each role under your purview, list the types of errors you rate as most impactful to job performance. These are the types of errors that, when committed too often, can jeopardize your team's performance.

For example, a manufacturing company could capture product defects per employee. A homebuilder could track the number of changes requested by homeowners that were improperly executed, thereby costing the company money and causing customer dissatisfaction.

Employees can take initiatives that go above and beyond basic job expectations for every role. Top-performing companies have highly engaged employees who often take the initiative, setting the tone for other employees and leading to greater workforce motivation. So, every organization should take stock of how its employees rate in this area.

You can track this by recording the number of times an employee takes initiative, and the frequency. You can score these actions from 1-3, from least to most consequential, to get a meaningful weekly or monthly total.

If your organization invests substantially in professional development and training resources, you’ll want to understand your return on investment (ROI). To do this, compare the above metrics before and after the training period. Give the employee a few weeks to integrate the new knowledge before evaluating the ‘after’ phase.

The concept here is similar to getting an annual physical; the doctor administers yearly tests to get a baseline of your health and measures the changes over time. Of course, there are confounding factors like becoming more experienced and learning on the job, so it’s impossible to isolate the effects of training completely, but since each employee is evaluated in the same way, it’s a fair way to compare ROI from the investment you’re making in each team member.

One of the great benefits of instituting employee performance metrics is that you can set expectations early on from the hiring and onboarding phases. Strong performers want to be evaluated objectively because they know their performance will be seen. Workers who like to get by doing the minimum will look for another employer. The end result is that the objectives of team members, managers, and executives are in sync with the business's goals.