As a team leader, you must embrace your critical role to foster workforce motivation, commitment, and retention. You are a key player in nurturing and developing staffers. Unfortunately, your reputation will be at stake if your department does not achieve its responsibilities. So directing the active personnel performance-tracking process well is imperative.
Keeping up with your employees’ work quality and productivity ensures that they are completing their duties properly so your firm can fulfill its mission. Besides being useful during current reviews, performance charts help supervisors prepare for subsequent rating cycles.
Establish Guidelines
Set your staff and company up for success by using these strategies:
Expectations: Align meaningful, attainable expectations with your corporate mission and program purpose.
Objectives: Approach the goal-setting process as a collective effort to engage team members. Request suggestions for essential elements or results to support your crew’s work while achieving your firm’s objectives. Set short-term, achievable targets. Tracking program progress is easier over brief increments than a whole year.
Communications: Explain what you expect from each worker clearly, based on individual job descriptions. National PEO’s specialists can create or update your job descriptions to improve employee understanding. Define each person’s role and any changes per project. Provide goals and timelines for completing them. Clarify any measurements you will use.
Collect Data
Charting individual progress requires listening, people skills, planning, and organization. Take ample notes and gather individual records while following these fact-finding steps:
Observations: Tour your department or work area periodically to observe employee activities. Regular check-ins will help you discover what aspects are most successful and which need assistance, possibly by removing obstacles. You will gain incredible insights into your crew’s progress and how they strive to meet assigned goals.
Listening: Paying attention to employees’ remarks will help you discover how their co-workers are doing. Learning how to discern their comments’ subtext will make detecting the real issues easier.
Spot checks: Examining everyone’s work does not need to be a daily routine. Just do it frequently enough to discover and address any concerns like low output before they develop into giant problems. Similar to pop quizzes, do not forewarn personnel when inspections will occur.
Reports: Instruct team members to email you regular reports covering all in-progress and completed work.
Meetings: Sit down with every staffer on a weekly basis. Pose direct job-related questions. Assess how work is going. Help overcome any problems. If someone is vague, he could be covering for running behind schedule. Draw out enough information to sense where he’s stuck on his timeline. Offer suggestions to get him back on track. Do not go overboard documenting every minor one-time setback. Keep records of delays only if they recur often.
Chart Behaviors
Format: Using a standard spreadsheet program, you can customize clean, organized, accurate staff records to serve as efficient performance-tracking tools. Measure activities in short intervals like one to two weeks. Do not attempt to pack too many explanations into your tables. Stick to simple and brief notations. Or use a number or letter grading system to condense your data.
Group and individual records: A departmental tracking chart will depict your labor force’s inadequacies and achievements visually. Also keep weekly or daily performance assessments on every employee with classifications such as poor (F), acceptable (C), and excellent (A). Those individual information logs will help you pinpoint problems that need fixing and single out exemplary workers who deserve rewards.
Share Appraisals
Ongoing evaluations: Assess performance and communicate progress continually. Do not withhold all of your feedback for annual reviews when tips along the way could upgrade functioning at critical junctures. Constructive comments include timely and specific notes about short-term targets and overall goals.
Dual reviews: Schedule in-person mid-year and annual reviews. Halfway conversations will help workers improve their year-end evaluations. Encourage discussions to determine the most effective ways of reaching upcoming milestones and long-range goals. Base overall ratings during final evaluations on crewmembers’ annual accomplishments. Recognize outstanding performance.
Offer Remedies
Resources: Ensure that your staff has access to all necessary resources, tools, and environments that enhance job performance. Make sure that relevant literature, technology, and other practices and materials that enable success are available.
Training: To improve worker knowledge, provide mentoring and coaching. Use traditional and modern instructional methods to heighten learning, address areas that need improvement, and optimize staff strength. Ask employees about what assistance would be most helpful. Allow enough time for them to learn updated procedures and routines.