Employee performance is an important aspect that many small businesses in Kenya do not necessarily give a lot of attention to.
Assessing performance of your employees is not only about expecting productivity from them. As an entrepreneur, you should also invest time and money into growth and development of your employees.
That said, there are a number of ways for you to base your employee performance analysis on in order to get a holistic picture. Two employees are not the same. They are motivated by different factors and have different measures of success. So, while you keep everyone aligned to your business plan objectives, you must realize this to measure performance of your employees the right way.
Here is a list of 8 different ways to measure employee performance:
1.Quantity
This is a classic way of assessing your employees. It’s most useful when in a business where you have to produce unit after unit like a food manufacturing company. You can also use it to class your best sales people by worth of revenue they bring home. Don’t be blinded and ignore quality though.
2. Quality
Now you can turn screws on your sales people and measure how much of their interactions out here is converted to sales. You don’t wanna bring home a lot of money at great costs. It won’t be good for business. This measure is great for services business where you can monitor processes. The problem is that it’s not easy to come up with an objective standard for quality. Think of all the movie suggestions, from your pals, that you turned down.
3. Time
You can always opt to combine the above to by checking how much time it takes to handle select activities in your business. You can be sure that deadlines will be met and a minimum level of quality will be achieved. But be careful, we’re not so big on time in this part of the world. You should accept this truth by being flexible.
4. Efficiency
There is achieving goals and there is achieving goals at minimum cost as we’ve touched on with sales employees above. Efficiency is important for small businesses that are tight on cash and experience. Therefore, this should be one of your go-to performance measurement metrics. Don’t be like those businesses that splurge in good times and only remember to cut costs during down turns.
5. Creativity
So, like we’ve seen with quality, creativity is not that easy to measure objectively. But you still need creativity in business. What to do? You can, for instance, measure how creative an effort, a process or activity really is by its results. Will it leave things better for your business? Is it a shot in the dark? But don’t be too rigid that you shun ideas. Creativity is doing things like no one else does, after all.
6. Adherence to rules
This might sound a little bit ridiculous or even funny. But there will be no fun when you suffer from employee-theft. Employees are your team and for that to work everyone has to be kept in line. Besides regular policy to be followed, you can monitor habits of your employees while at work.
7. Peer-appraisal
You can review each employee yourself and close that chapter or you can have them review each other’s performance. You then compare that to your assessment. This is a good way to eliminate bias. Even from your end! You can also use peer review to rank employees and therefore monitor their development.
8. Self-appraisal
It is said that under-performers over-estimate themselves while over-performers underestimate themselves. They have greater awareness about areas they need to improve on. This is a good way to force introspection among your employees, and take slackers through how they can be motivated to work harder. Don’t you think?
Do you use or know other unique measures of employee performance? Let us know!
