Admiral Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, a computer scientist, mathematician, and pioneer of computer programming, said, “One accurate measurement is worth a thousand opinions.” In the world of work, for decades, human resources (HR) have depended upon the reporting manager’s opinion of their team’s performance.
This puts a lot of pressure on a few individuals to evaluate the quantitative and qualitative aspects of an employee’s work performance. It can result in biases, inaccuracies, and oversights, despite the best efforts of all parties involved.
It also puts too much emphasis on processes like appraisals to evaluate how employees are performing without the necessary data to back these conversations.
This is where technology can empower both HR and team managers to build more transparency, accountability, measurability, and engagement into the evaluation process via easy-to-use, sophisticated, and competitively priced HR onboarding solutions.
It brings accuracy to how an employee’s work is measured, and its by-products include lower attrition, higher talent mobility, enhanced productivity, and accelerated business growth.
What Are HR Onboarding Solutions?
This is software that initiates communication between an employee and employee right from the beginning of their engagement with the company. It helps the new hire integrate into their teams and quickly become productive.
The benefit of HR onboarding solutions is that it simplifies the process at scale and offers a tracking mechanism that allows companies to measure the outputs with relatively less human intervention. It also offers relevant data, which equips all stakeholders – HR, managers, and employees to measure work performance through quantifiable proof.
Access to HR onboarding solutions has also triggered another interesting trend – HRs do not need to wait to onboard new hires the day they officially join the team. They can be onboarded even earlier and have access to the company’s work culture.
Additionally, HR can also onboard job applicants and engage via the platform. They can save engagement history and documents like resumes and video content on the cloud, which can be accessed for future reference.
4 Quantifiable Work Performance Measures
We break down four important employee performance metrics and how each can be measured more accurately and continually.
Effectiveness of Work
Many employees spend a lot of time working, but “busyness” does not necessarily translate to results. Quality of work matters for higher productivity, which in turn also motivates employees.
Here’s an example. X makes ten sales calls a day but has been able to convert four leads into clients. Y makes six calls a day and has converted three into clients. How can you measure the performance of each of these employees?
X and Y’s work can be appraised in several ways, including which are measurable:
- How much revenue did they bring in?
- How much time did they spend making cold calls?
- Do they qualify for a lead before making a call?
- On what note did each call end – was there a follow-up discussion?
- Did the employee do a follow-up call?
- What is the lifetime value of their customer?
- The average revenue per customer
- Percentage of revenues from old vs. newer clients
The evaluation process needs to be adapted to each functional role and aligned to relevant targets. Breaking down the metrics empowers employees to work on areas where they need to improve.
Investment in Learning and Growth
More and more businesses today want to promote employees internally. But how do you determine who has the potential to grow and take on leadership roles? One approach is to measure an employee’s appetite for growth early on.
Here are some indicators:
- Do they show up at the various training opportunities offered by the company?
- Are they leveraging their learnings to enhance the quality of work?
- What is their response to feedback?
- How engaged are they in discussions related to improving and contributing to the work culture with recommendations?
- Do they attend in-house industry-related events such as expert talks?
- Are they upgrading skills and expanding their knowledge on their own time and dime?
To make sure that the performance management system takes these indicators into consideration, use data such as attendance, participation in learning events, and skill improvement over time.
Ability to Thrive in Teams
Even if an employee is highly skilled and invested in their personal growth, their interpersonal communication with team members plays a role in their ability to grow faster. Too many conflicts and poor communication skills can hinder their performance in the long run.
Here are some ways to measure team skills:
- Inviting employees to review team members
- HR onboarding solutions offer data on how employees engage with each other online via comments, likes, and acknowledgments, which indicate how employees are viewed by teammates
- Allocate a day in a week where team members virtually acknowledge those who supported them that week – such activities offer unique insights
- Do they invest time supporting/ mentoring other team members?
Not every employee needs to excel at working in teams. However, understanding their abilities can help HR map growth paths and continually deliver relevant feedback, not only during appraisals.
Responses in Self-Assessments
Employees are often aware of their shortcomings, strengths, and challenges. But they lack the tools to bring these insights to the attention of their employers.
By leveraging HR onboarding solutions, HRs, in collaboration with team leads, can deploy self-assessment tools that nudge employees to rate their work, highlight areas where they need support, and outline goals and challenges faced in their work.
Data from self-assessment tools can provide deep insights that HR can turn into actionable investments in the team to improve work culture, training programs, efficient processes and
In Conclusion
Early investments in robust HR onboarding solutions can help companies track employee performance even before they join the company. Data collected over time enables employers to make better decisions, craft superior policies, promote deserving employees, and invest in training to close the gaps.
Kytes’ state-of-the-art HR onboarding solutions offer a unified platform for employers to accurately measure employee performance as an ongoing, efficient, data-driven process.
If you are an employer looking to automate and value-add to all HR processes, partner with Kytes and let us plan a superior onboarding experience for your job applicants and employees in your business.
Build a robust foundation to streamline onboarding, measuring, training, learning, and event-related engagement, automate various tasks, and drive higher ROI in your business outcomes.
