How to Track Employee Performance: The Best Way to Do it
In the current working landscape, where employees are spread across traditional office spaces, hybrid settings, and remote environments, the importance of tracking employee performance has never been more pronounced.
As managers and team leaders strive to maintain cohesion and drive excellence within their teams, finding the most effective ways of tracking performance becomes essential.
Whether you’re looking to foster collaboration in face-to-face interactions, optimize productivity in hybrid models, or nurture engagement in remote setups, here you’ll find a complete guide on how to track employee performance and the best tools to help you with it.
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How to track employee performance
Key aspects for tracking employee performance
Below, we’ll list several criteria to guide your employee performance review.
- Productivity and time management – review the employee’s ability to manage their time effectively, complete tasks, and meet deadlines. To support that, implement a productivity time tracker.
- Quality of work – the employee’s work should be in line with the company’s requirements, so evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of the work, as well as the quality of services and projects delivered.
- Goal achievement – here is where you evaluate whether your employees have met their goals and objectives, both quantitative and qualitative goals.
- Technical skills – assess the technical skills and specific knowledge needed to do the job. This may involve assessing skills related to the role, such as knowledge of software, specific techniques, and expertise in the field.
- Communication skills – evaluate the employee’s ability to communicate clearly and effectively with colleagues, superiors, clients, and other stakeholders.
- Problem-solving and decision-making – assess the employee’s capacity to identify and solve problems, make sound decisions, and handle unexpected situations.
- Overall contribution – evaluate the employee’s overall impact on the team and department, taking into account their contributions beyond their immediate responsibilities.
1. Set clear goals and expectations
Tracking employee performance requires the implementation of a systematic approach that integrates various methods and proper tools. It is essential to have a clear working methodology: any details in the way you work could be subject to analysis and improvement.
Before starting to track your employees’ performance, it is also crucial that everyone has a clear understanding of their objectives so that they have a basis for assessing whether the goals have been met and to what extent.
However, it’s important to note that this tracking process may vary according to the company’s culture, the nature of work, whether employees work at the office, remotely, or in both settings and specific objectives.
Learn more about how to set clear goals.
2. Define performance indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable and measurable metrics used to evaluate the progress, effectiveness, and success of an individual, team, department, project, or organization in achieving specific goals and objectives.
KPIs provide a way to track performance and make informed decisions based on data-driven insights. It’s important to select the right KPIs that align with the established goals and provide meaningful insights.
Additionally, KPIs may evolve as objectives change or as you better understand what truly impacts success in your specific context.
To properly track employee performance, ensure your KPIs are measurable, quantifiable, comparative, and actionable so that you have accurate data and results.
Some examples of KPIs that can be used to track employee performance:
- Sales revenue
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Lead conversion rate
- Project completion time
- Employee productivity
3. Use proper tools to track employee performance
Various tools are available to help track and manage employee performance more effectively. These tools range from software platforms specifically designed for performance management to general project management and communication tools that can be adapted for tracking performance.
Further in this article, we provide a comprehensive list of tools.
4. Assess the results
Tracking employee performance is continuous work; therefore assessing results is as important as evaluating employees.
Evaluate not only the achievement of goals but also progress in terms of professional development and the acquisition of new skills.
Combine quantitative metrics, such as sales figures or productivity, with qualitative assessments and overall contribution to the team.
Schedule time in your agenda to provide feedback. You can do it in different ways: 1-to-1, retrospective team meetings, etc. Feedback is crucial if you want to be a good team leader and improve employee performance and productivity.
Read also: Retrospectives for remote teams
5. Set up an action plan with the employees
Based on every data collected from the previous steps, create individual development plans to help employees improve in specific areas and achieve their goals.
The action plan can help translate the insights gained from performance tracking into actionable steps that can drive improvements, enhance employee development, and contribute to the organization’s overall success.
It also bridges the gap between assessment and improvement. It transforms feedback and evaluation into tangible steps that lead to enhanced skills, increased productivity, and professional advancement.
TIP: The best ideas to improve team performance
Why track employee performance?
Tracking employee performance is crucial for several reasons.
Firstly, the goal of tracking employee performance is not only to evaluate but also to support and enhance their growth. By properly tracking employee performance and productivity, you get valuable insights into individual and team contributions, which helps you to identify high performers, allocate resources effectively, and make informed decisions about promotions, bonuses, and training opportunities.
You also get to understand your ROI better. Employees who work more and produce quality work indicate a higher ROI, and those who take more breaks and deliver less in the same amount of time indicate a lower ROI. With this data, team managers can make proper adjustments.
Performance tracking also facilitates open communication between managers and employees, enabling timely feedback and addressing concerns promptly.
Setting clear and realistic goals and measuring them properly is important because it fosters a culture of accountability and motivation, pushing employees to achieve their best.
Read also: How to measure the success of a team
Tools to manage and track team performance
Timeular
Timeular is the most effortless and accurate time tracking solution to track teams’ performance. 10,000+ companies such as Google, Audi, Toyota, McKinsey, Bang&Olufsen choose Timeular to track their time and stay on top of their time management.
Timeular is considered one of the best tracking solutions because it consolidates intelligent timekeeping methods into one platform, allowing time to be tracked in a few seconds per day. With up to 95% less employee time needed for tracking, Timeular provides 10x more accurate data for precise project billing, improved estimations, and increased efficiency. Ultimately, Timeular can boost your business profitability by up to 20%.
We have become 20% more profitable with Timeular because everyone is in the habit of time tracking.
Richard Wingfield, Head Geek at Envision Design
The team time tracker that teams truly enjoy!
Timeular is the go-to team time tracking tool embraced by over 50,000 teams that rediscovered the joy and accuracy of time tracking.
Top Timeular features for team’s performance
- Timeular is intuitive and effortless to use. Hence, it is for your team to pick up the time tracking habit.
- Budgets and alerts will help the team to stay within budget and deadlines.
- Tags and notes will help team members to add specific details to each time entry.
- Automatic time tracking. Fill in timesheets without lifting a finger. Timeular tracks time automatically.
- Up to 3,000 integrations that will allow your team to use their favorite tools with Timeular
- Accurate and customizable reports about the team’s productivity. Filter, round and export the data in multiple formats
Track time becomes effortless
Timeular makes time tracking effortless with its extremely intuitive interface and multiple tracking techniques. In Timeular, you can track time with multiple methods, and the team can use their favorite ones.
- Flipping the physical Tracker – and hardware that you can flip to start tracking up to 1,000 activities.
- Enabling automated time tracking – do your task, and Timeular will record your work in the background.
- Using keyboard shortcuts
- Connecting their calendars and adding calendar events to their timesheet in one click.
Leave and time off tracking
Work time is important for team performance, but so is time off. In Timeular with the leave tracker functionality, you can track any type of leave: paid leave, sick leave, and many more. Tracking paid leave has many benefits for managers and HR departments, such as:
- Easy method for adding and monitoring all leave requests from the whole team.
- Avoid frustration and mistakes by manually tracking leave requests in spreadsheets.
- Enjoy greater flexibility and transparency in leave tracking and reporting.
- Track work hours for full- and part-time workers, including over- and minus-hours.
Clear and insightful performance reports
Timeular is among the best time trackers because automates tracking billable hours and creating transparent time reports for your clients. The app provides a precise breakdown of your activities to ensure that each little task is tracked and added to your invoice. You can export your reports to PDF, XLSX, or CSV.
The precise reports give our customers a detailed overview about our services, which is key to get their approval and long-term trust
Felix, Owner of 22GRAD
Ratings
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Time tracking is, in general, a great strategy to uplift employee performance. Ensure you’re well informed about all the time tracking alternatives out there.
Read also:
- Time Doctor alternatives
- Clockify vs Timeular
- The best employee time tracking software
- Clockify vs. Toggl: Which one is the best time tracker for you?
Asana
Asana is a project-management and workload management tool that helps teams organize their projects and tasks, streamlining workflows.
The application offers integrations with time tracking tools, allowing users to log the time spent on tasks, which can be used to create performance reports that highlight productivity, efficiency, and time allocation.
It also provides a very visual representation of employees’ progress so managers can easily see which tasks are completed, in progress, or overdue, allowing them to assess an employee’s performance at a glance.
Read also: Track time in Asana
Monday.com
Monday.com is one of the best team productivity tools for tracking employee performance. It allows team managers to create tasks and rate their priority, set specific goals, and assign them to different employees who update the status and progress of each task as they go.
Monday.com empowers managers to monitor performance, provide feedback, and drive productivity, ultimately optimizing employee contributions to organizational success.
TIP: Monday.com time tracking integration
BambooHR
An excellent tool for small businesses, BambooHR is another useful tool to help track employee performance.
The platform offers a comprehensive group of tools that enable precise monitoring and enhancement of employee contributions, allow managers to set clear performance objectives, conduct performance reviews, and track employee progress.
The platform is also known for its user-friendly interface, customizable performance evaluation templates, and insightful reporting. It empowers organizations to recognize and manage better high-performing employees, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions for talent development and management.
Read also: Performance review tips for employees
Conclusions
In this article, you’ve learned how to effectively track employee performance through clear goals, systematic methods, and proper tools.
To track employee performance, it is essential to follow some guidelines such as:
- Set clear goals and expectations.
- List key aspects for tracking employee performance.
- Define performance indicators (KPIs).
- Use proper tools to track employee performance.
- Assess the results.
- Set up an action plan with the employees.
Moreover, we’ve seen how tools such as Timeular, Asana, Monday.com, and Bamboo HR can help tracking employee performance. In particular, Timeular stands out as a time tracking tool for its intuitive interface, team-friendly features, and reports capabilities.
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