The lifeblood of your company is employee performance, and if you have employees you know exactly how fluctuating the performance can be from person to person. A key to a successful working environment, happier colleagues and ultimately more productive employees, is managing and helping to further employee performance. Both overall, and individually.

Soft KPI Examples for Employee Performance:

• Attitude
• Efficiency
• Quality of Work
• Following Company Values
• Innovative thinking & Problem-solving

Hard KPI Examples for Employee Performance:

• Reaching sales-targets
• Generating a certain ROI
• Sickdays

How to increase the performance of your employees:

Your organization might have more, or different, employee performance areas, but the strategy for measuring and improving on them remain the same:

1. Identify the area where you want the employee’s performance to increase.
2. Have the managers ask the employee how they can support them in increasing performance in that area.
3. Set down a goal and follow up at an agreed upon date.
4. Optional: Cut down your time-costs and increase your employee engagement by incorporating a performance management tool such as eloomi.

People are different – Knowing how is half the battle

Keep in mind that not everyone learns the same way, as Einstein said:

“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid.”

In the same way, one person might be motivated by talking about their role and require a one-to-one conversation to make them understand that they are capable of making a difference, and that their performance and quality of work is essential to the company. Doing this can quickly become expensive in man-hours and the coordination 100s of people. Luckily, we live in a digital age where everyone uses their mobiles constantly, so using a tool with a 1 to 1 coaching session becomes a huge cost-saver and doesn’t sacrifice the personal touch. Other people might be motivated by having rating scales and seeing how their numbers compare to the rest of the team; are they bringing in more clients, answering more calls, providing better customer service etc. Enabling teams like that to see and compare on a leaderboard will motivate them towards reaching higher targets. (Combining them with conversations as needed will increase the overall efficiency of the employee’s performance plan)

Enabling & Empowering to increase employee performance different – Doing is the other half

If you truly want to measure and increase employee performance, you should consider the link between providing learning material and applying it in practice. Helping your employees better follow company values can be achieved by having them read the staff book and take a test. However, if you combine it with the fact that they get to have a conversation with their manager and feel like they are important in the company, they are much more likely to become part of the culture rather than acting in a way because they feel that they have to. Use a system to deliver the learning, gain insights into how people interact with the material you provide, and create performance plans based on the insights.

Things to keep in mind:

• Reward employees who exceed standards, even if they do it consistently. Make it cool to be above standard, instead of being forgotten.
• Follow up and monitor the KPI’s regularly.
• Try and understand how to help under performers become better instead. They might be amazing if they get the right help.
• Make sure both the manager, the company and the employee interprets the goals the same.