How to monitor employee performance against goals

Research tells us that clear goals with effective measures can improve performance by more than 30%. To have ‘effective measures’ we need to monitor performance against objectives. That is how:

The key to effective monitoring is to identify a variety of methods, so that you can then choose the method that is easiest to apply and most effective. Let’s start with the easy part: monitoring quantifiable goals. Here are some examples

Tracking Methods for Measurable Goals

sales reports
deadlines put
Bug reports
accuracy reports
documents
proposals
maps
budget forecast
produced widgets

These tend to be the monitoring methods that most managers are comfortable with because they are all about what the employee does. It’s easy to see if your employee is hitting a sales target or submitting precise work, and these are great monitoring methods for quantity, quality, and time elements of work.

The difficulty arises when these are the only monitoring methods a manager uses because most jobs are not just about ‘what’, but also ‘how’ your employee does their job. About;

• how they work as team members
• how they work with clients
• how they deal with problems
• how they deal with change

In short, their behaviors.

If you only monitor the “what” of the job, you are only monitoring half of the job. And if you’re only supervising half of the job, then that’s probably the only half the employee will feel worth concentrating on.

How to monitor behaviors

Here are three ways to monitor behaviors

1. Observation

Observation is taking a planned approach to seeing your employee ‘in action’. The idea is that you plan to look at the specific behaviors you’ve outlined in your performance objectives. For example, if you have agreed that a performance goal for teamwork is ‘offer help to team members’ and ‘contribute to team meetings’, those are the specific behaviors you plan to observe. So it’s about;

• look at the performance objectives you have agreed to that relate to the behavioral elements of the job and then
• plan how you will observe those behaviors, for example, paying special attention to the employee’s behavior at the next team meeting

2. Inform

Reporting is about your employee reporting back to you on their performance. This is a really useful technique in which the employee is responsible for ‘evidencing’ his performance in relation to the objectives he has agreed to.

A good example would be if you had an agreed performance objective of ‘effective time management’ which included ‘take steps to manage interruptions’. The employee would then simply report back with a few examples of when he had taken steps to manage the interruptions.

3.Comments

Feedback is about getting feedback from people about the employee’s performance. This could be from;

• customers
• providers
• team members
• other departments

It is important that you only look for feedback;

a) As agreed between you and the employee and
b) Described in the performance objectives

For example, an objective related to ‘Customer Service’ is ‘Customer feedback reflects a high level of satisfaction’. This is the feedback that you and/or your employee would focus on collecting.

The key principle

The wider the range of methods you use, the more effective your monitoring will be, as using a variety of methods means you get a more balanced view of employee performance. This means you can give the kind of feedback that employees tell us they want more of, because they find it constructive, motivating, and performance-enhancing. And of course we know: ‘what gets measured gets done’ and it is impossible to measure without monitoring.