As a manager, understanding when your team members are succeeding and where they might need additional support is a crucial part of this position. But it’s not always clear exactly how performance measurement is conducted, especially when it comes to mobile or remote teams.
If you’re wondering how to measure team members’ performance and whether you need performance management tools and techniques, this guide can help.
Keeping track of and reporting on progress is essential, both from a business perspective and on an individual level. Performance reporting helps you as a manager to understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses (both individually and as a group) and set goals and targets to build their skills – for their own career progression and to help them become even stronger assets for your business.
From a business perspective, measuring team performance can help companies understand how teams within the organization perform and respond accordingly. If certain departments are underperforming, businesses can provide additional support or training to build skills and improve efficiency in team members. Teams that perform particularly well can be rewarded to recognize their hard work and motivate them to do even better.
Individual performance reporting helps your employees understand where they are succeeding and where there is room for improvement in their work quality. This information is invaluable to help them grow and progress at any stage in their career, whether they’re just starting out or have been working in the industry for 20 years.
Performance reports give you a strong baseline to work from with employees and refer to during progress meetings, annual reviews, and discussing things like salary and benefits.
There are several steps you can take to track your team’s progress on a project manually. Using these best practices, you can help improve team effectiveness and productivity. These actionable can help you develop performance metrics for your business’s human resources going forward.
Work with your team to create a framework for the project and all the stages involved. This will give them a clear outline from the outset, so everyone understands what they’re working towards and how to get there. This is also the perfect time to create a work breakdown structure for the project.
The project outline should include goals and milestones so your team stays on track and motivated. Establishing milestones also helps everyone work at the same pace towards a shared goal, which can prevent disagreements or misunderstandings from arising along the way.
Arrange weekly or even daily meetings to check in with the team and ensure all business objectives are being met. This allows everyone the opportunity to share their progress or discuss any issues they’ve encountered with the wider team or current and ongoing project tasks.
Make sure everyone knows when work is due. Timekeeping is an important skill, and one tardy team member can hold the rest of the group back. By time-tracking projects by tasks and employees, it can help keep everything on track and progressing smoothly.
When teams work as a group on projects, it’s an excellent opportunity to get first-hand experience on what individual team members are like to work with. Ask your team to give (always confidential) feedback on their team members, including what they did well and areas they could improve. This feedback can be used in your team’s Project Performance Appraisals.
To gather the necessary information to complete a performance report for team member performance, you will need specific inputs. These inputs are as follows:
This input focuses on monitoring work results and examining vendors’ deliverables, ensuring that specific tasks are performed correctly, and adhere to the project management plan accordingly. Work performance input covers:
Invoices should describe the work or material delivered by a vendor to you for the project in question and include any necessary supporting documentation to describe what was delivered. Keeping track of such information can help project management professionals ensure that everything is progressing accordingly and that performance of the team overall is not hindered in any way.
The project management plan is the documentation that maps out every aspect of the plan, including:
This plan is made at the start of a new project and can help measure and track a project’s performance from conception to completion.
Performance measurements provide managers with objective evidence of the degree to which a performance result is occurring over time. Performance measurements are also known as Key Performance Indicator Formulas or KPI formulas. KPIs help businesses measure the strengths and weaknesses of their workforce using defined performance metrics.
Depending on the project, the project manager might use the following formula:
Forecasting uses the information gathered in performance measurements to forecast the future costs of the project. This information helps managers determine if the project’s cost and timeline are on track and match the project plan’s projected costs and timeline.
There are two types of forecasting:
These measurements help project managers analyze and evaluate the various processes involved in completing a project and compare them to the organization’s standard business processes.
Quality control measurements are not the actual quality metric, or key performance indicators (KPIs) but the processes of analyzing data to get those metrics. To do this, you need a quality management plan.
There are a wide range of automated performance management tools available for tracking and reporting, making performance management easier and less time-consuming. Tools for project and performance managing include:
On top of these tools, managers can use project managing techniques, like the following.
Gathering and keeping records of your team members’ performance helps track their progress and offer insightful commentary when it’s time for their annual review.
Status review meetings are usually reserved for more senior members in your organization to gather and discuss ongoing projects and employees’ status. It’s a valuable opportunity to gain insights into how your team performs in relation to the organization, especially if they work across teams and with other senior staff.
As the name suggests, time reporting systems provide data on time spent in projects. This can be viewed by the team, by individuals and within a certain timeframe. Timecard reports help you predict future expenses to ensure ongoing projects stay within your budget.
These systems report based on incoming and outgoing costs to give project managers a clear picture of how profitable the project is going to be after all expenses have been covered.
Measuring your employee’s performance is made easier with QuickBooks Time software, which features project, task, and employee tracking. With granular-level data at your fingertips, combine your own findings with the numbers to gain a thorough overall picture of how each member of your team is performing and progressing.
Help your employees grow while improving your business’s overall success when you use performance management techniques alongside employee scheduling and time tracking software. Such team member performance tracking can help improve your business on all levels.
Stay up to date on your team’s tasks and projects with QuickBooks Time. Sign up for a free trial and begin your performance reporting today.
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