Quality Quantified: Learning To Measure Your Employees

No two people will perform in exactly the same way when it comes to the work which they do. Some will be able to work for days on end, getting average results while they throw themselves into their work. Others, though, will find it easy to get excellent results, but won’t have the stamina to work for more than a few hours. As an employer, it is extremely important that you are aware of these strengths and weaknesses if you want to be able to leverage them correctly. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of the best ways to measure your employees, assessing how well they are working for your business.

Peer-Reviews

While you will get a good insight into your business when you’re able to spend time with it, the people working for you will often have the best idea of how their team mates are getting on. When someone isn’t pulling their weight, for example, most offices will be well aware of it, and people won’t be very happy. Peer-reviews are a great way to overcome this. Once every six months or so, you should have your employees anonymously rate one another on different aspects of their work. In the end, you should be left with a range of interesting statistics.

Of course, when you’re relying on other people to give you information, you have to be wary of pettiness within your ranks. Some team members may simply dislike one another, resulting in negative feedback which doesn’t truly reflect their work. To overcome this, you should be looking for examples of bad feedback which seem to be unanimous, ensuring that you’re not going to pick on someone because other people have decided to be mean to them. This is only the start of your measuring, though.

Personal Development Plans

It can be very easy for people to slip into a pattern with their work when they aren’t pushed to do more with it. This leaves a lot of employees to let their skills become stagnant, and they will never be able to make their role more complicated. Personal development plans have been used by businesses for decades to track their employee’s performance throughout the year. Staying on top of something like this is absolutely crucial, and forgetting to give people their assessments will limit the success you are able to find from it.

This works by talking to your employee and outlining the areas in their work which need to be improved. You can agree on a target for them to reach, along with talking about the way that they will reach it. This works extremely well, as it gives your team the chance to understand how well they are doing, rather than simply working at a job which doesn’t give them any feedback. If you hold meetings with each team member every couple of months, you will quickly see their work start to get better, especially when your employees are young.

Customer Feedback

There are few people in the world who have an insight into your employee’s effectiveness than the customers they work with. Getting feedback from people like this isn’t always easy, but it will open the doors to some truly honest information, and this can be hard to get when you’re only working internally. You should only ever ask for feedback when a customer has had something done for them, like making a purchase or getting some product support, as this will ensure that they have their experience fresh on their mind.

Of course, though, you need to make this as easy as possible, or you could find yourself struggling to get people to fill in your forms. There are loads of companies out there with the tools to help you to collect feedback from your customers. By using a service like this, you will put your surveys into the hands of experienced professionals, ensuring that your customers always have the best experience. As time goes on, you will learn what you need to do to be able to handle jobs like this for yourself.

Digital Metrics

Nothing tells a better story about the success of your team than numbers. When people are working for you, it’s crucial that they have targets in place, and that you have a way to make sure that they are reaching their targets. In the case of a call center, each person on the phones will need to talk to a minimum amount of customers each day. Collecting this information is easy, and you can have your employees do it themselves by simply adding to a spreadsheet whenever they complete a piece of work.

Their Past Experience

When people are trying to get a job from you, they will always give you an idea of what they’ve done in the past. It’s fair to build your expectations for their work out of this, with those who have had very complicated jobs being able to overcome issues which other people won’t be able to face. It’s fair to judge people based on their past experiences, but you have to be careful not to take this too far. Employers will often make the mistake of pushing their best and brightest as hard as they can, leaving those who need motivation the most to struggle, and causing an imbalance of work in the office.

It can be hard to make sure that you’re getting what you pay for when you hire people. A lot of companies spend huge amounts of this area, giving each of their team members enough money to live on, while also paying for loads of other little features which come with them. As time goes on, this will get easier and easier, and you will get better at pushing people in the right direction. Of course, though, this work is very important, and this means that you will need to avoid letting it become too routine, as this will make it easy for employees to get around it.