Tracking employee performance metrics may seem like an unnecessary distraction from your business operations — either an employee is doing their job well or they aren’t. But traditional performance reviews are often subjective, and they may not give you enough insight into an employee’s quality of work and their competency levels.
Employee performance metrics allow you to assess an employee’s work in a fair and objective way, and identify opportunities for performance improvement.
Here’s how to track employee performance metrics in a way that supports the career development of individual team members and your overall business goals.
What Are Employee Performance Metrics?
Employee performance metrics are data-driven assessments that tell you how well an employee is meeting specific goals or benchmarks. You can use these metrics to track an individual employee’s performance over time or see how well your team members are working together to achieve broader organizational goals.
Performance metrics may take the form of key performance indicators (KPIs), which measure your progress towards a particular outcome, or objectives and key results (OKRs), which offer a framework toward achieving your performance goals.
Employee performance metrics can be broken down into two categories:
- Quantitative metrics are those with clearly defined measurements, such as an employee’s task completion rate or number of sales per employee.
- Qualitative metrics are based on more subjective criteria — such as customer satisfaction scores — but can still be tracked in a standardized manner.
Benefits of Tracking Employee Performance Metrics
Employee performance metrics can help you make data-driven decisions, but they don’t take human insight out of the performance management process entirely. Here are just a few benefits of using key employee performance metrics to inform decisions.
Set goals and expectations
First, simply establishing performance metrics and KPIs can help improve employee productivity by giving employees clear targets to aim for. When employees know what criteria you’ll be using to assess their performance, they can take steps to align their activities in the workplace with your overall company goals.
Address poor performance
Next, you can use individual performance data to address quality of work issues with a performance improvement plan or employee training program. Employee performance metrics also serve as a paper trail to show that you’re treating your employees fairly, and giving them sufficient opportunities to address performance issues.
Improve employee retention
Tracking performance metrics can help you reduce turnover rates at your company and increase employee engagement. As part of a high-performance management system, you can use KPIs as a way to foster teamwork, reduce burnout, and help employees achieve their individual goals while improving business performance.
Top 5 Employee Performance Metrics to Measure
When deciding which employee performance metrics to track, you’ll need to think about which metrics are most important for your organizational performance goals. Here are five key employee performance metrics that are a good place to start.
1. Absenteeism
Absenteeism occurs when an employee misses work without prior approval from their manager. High absenteeism rates can be a reflection of low employee morale or poor time management on the part of individual employees. By tracking attendance with an absence management platform like Pulpstream, you can spot patterns of tardiness or excessive absences and reduce absenteeism in the workplace.
2. Sales figures
For sales teams, tracking key indicators like sales figures or sales calls can be a useful form of performance measurement. Potential performance metrics include the number of calls an employee makes in a day, the number of calls that resulted in a sale, or a ratio of the number of sales per number of calls.
You can use this information to check in with sales reps who are underperforming and provide additional mentoring or training to help them reach their sales goals.
3. Customer satisfaction scores
For employees who work directly with customers, a net promoter score (NPS) can be an effective way to measure performance. An NPS divides customers into groups based on whether or not they’re likely to recommend your business. Sending out an NPS survey after each customer interaction allows you to measure employee performance.
Employees who receive higher NPS or customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) are better suited for customer-facing roles than those with lower scores.
4. Work efficiency
Work efficiency refers to how much an employee can get done in a specific timeframe or with a certain set of resources. A team member who needs to work overtime to achieve their goals has lower work efficiency than one who finishes early every day.
Measuring employee efficiency can help you better allocate resources and assign tasks more effectively based on an employees’ ability.
5. Accuracy
Accuracy refers to the number of errors an employee makes, and is a key quality metric for employees who perform data entry or manual labor. How often do you have to redo an employee’s work to fix mistakes and avoid software bugs or product defects?
You can measure accuracy by tracking an employee’s error rate, such as the number of typos in a document or the number of mistakes per line of code.
How to Track Employee Performance Metrics
Every employee performance metric has its own set of criteria and measurements. The bottom line is to create a consistent method for tracking performance so you know that the measurements you took yesterday will still be relevant a year from now. Here are three ways to measure employee performance metrics in a consistent way.
Performance reviews
Performance evaluations allow you to take a snapshot of an employee’s performance and monitor their progress over time. This could take the form of a written report or a one-on-one meeting with the employee’s manager.
You can also use 360-degree feedback to request a performance appraisal from an employee’s colleagues. The key is to use standardized templates so you can track responses in a quantitative way, such as a scale of 1-10.
Employee attendance tracker
Some metrics are easy to track. When it comes to tracking employee attendance, you can use a time-tracking tool that logs an employee’s work hours manually. This type of tool allows your HR team to monitor overtime, ensure you comply with labor laws, and track an employee’s paid time off (PTO) and leave of absence balance.
Not only will an attendance tracker help you reduce absenteeism in the workplace, it can enable you streamline employee scheduling and payroll processing.
Employee relations platform
Using an all-in-one employee relations platform like Pulpstream can help you keep track of multiple performance metrics in one place. Pulpstream’s user-friendly, cloud-based interface provides a 360-degree view of each case, as well as a built-in AI engine to identify patterns and provide recommendations.
When you aggregate performance metrics in a single platform, you can run advanced workforce analytics to make data-driven decisions. Plus, you can use automation to streamline your HR workflows and take a more consistent approach to disciplinary action and performance management.
Track Employee Performance Metrics With Pulpstream
Employee performance metrics allow you to track which employees are meeting their performance benchmarks and which team members might need additional training or support. You can track quantitative metrics like work efficiency, as well as qualitative metrics like employee engagement and customer satisfaction scores.
Pulpstream’s cloud-based platform allows you to track employee performance metrics and manage employee relations all in one place. Start by identifying common employee relations issues like absenteeism and low morale, and address them with performance management, employee counseling, and other workplace initiatives.
From attendance tracking to personal improvement planning, Pulpstream helps you set organizational goals and work with your employees to achieve them.
Get a demo today to see how Pulpstream can improve employee performance!
