Tracking your team performance with metrics

If you have ever said something similar to “Hey Bob, what have you been working on this week?” or perhaps “what’s the status on this project?”, then you’re in need of some upgrades.  Tracking employee performance is typically a strained process where companies waste a ton of time that’s not needed.  What if you could manage projects, tasks, initiatives, service delivery all in one place and you could at a glance, see the status of nearly anything you wanted?  Let’s look at a few examples of how metrics can be used to streamline your process while also creating accountability for any role within the company.

Performance Reviews

For starters, every company should have employee reviews (or check ins) to some capacity if you don’t already.  Why? Because it helps your team members learn where they are now and where they’re looking to go?  Too many companies can create the feel that these reviews are merely an opinion poll as opposed to dropping some hard numbers into the conversation.  If everyone knows exactly where they are and can see for themselves at any time they want (and they know everyone can see), they’re more inclined to either want to improve performance, or move on.  Metrics create the transparent accountability that every company needs.

Sales Metrics

Your sales team probably has their own metrics, because sales is an easy target.  Amount of average deal, time to close, revenue generated and others are all great metrics for a sales rep or the sales team as a whole.  It’s measurable and easy to know where you’re at.  Every sales rep likes to forecast their income, especially if they’re more commission based, so adding features can not only help you, but help the team, and leadership.  Reps want to manage their pipeline, quotas, commission amounts, prospects and more.  Managers or leadership wants to know overall performance and if there’s any issues that need to be resolved.  How easy are you able to view this data?

Customer Centric Roles

If you take a role like Customer Service, this is much harder for most departments to define.  How do you know when they’re performing well?  How do you assess the individual?  If you immediately think number of calls fielded, or number of issues resolved, these items could just as easily say more about sales or service delivery than customer service couldn’t they?  This goes the same for your controllers, or finance team members.  How do you assess the individual?  This is where metrics is able to use the data these team members input into the system anyways as part of their daily tasks, and show you what to measure.  Every business is different here based on overall company goals.  How do you measure these roles?

We believe everyone in a company has a number (or 3), that’s important to their role and how the role can be measured.  If the business is a well oiled machine, every team member is contributing and performing.  If everyone hits weekly numbers, they’ll hit monthly, then quarterly and so on.

Questions to ask yourself

• Can each department/team see the info (at a glance), they need to without hunting or searching?
• Does leadership have complete insight into all areas of the business (or do you have to ask and have more meetings)?
• How do we assess certain job roles that might be harder to define in terms of performance?