The Best Tips to Boost Employee Performance

It’s happened to all of us. One sales person is rude, unhelpful or indifferent and we don’t want to step into that store again — even when we really love it. That’s the remarkable power of customer service. And that’s the reason businesses search high and low for actionable ways to improve employee performance.

But how do you know what to improve, and how to improve it, if you don’t know where the problem lies? This is why ongoing employee performance evaluations matter.

Too many businesses believe they’ve got employee performance evaluation covered, simply because they practice the same, structured evaluations every year. But, an employee performance review once a year isn't enough to account for how quickly the workplace, and employees, evolve.

Instead, more frequent and fair appraisals offer benefits like:

• Improved communication between managers and employees
• A culture of self-evaluation and improvement
• Increased understanding of role expectations

To reap these benefits and more, it’s important to understand what aspects of employee performance you need to measure, and how. And then you need to understand how ongoing training can revitalize your employee performance evaluation strategy.

Employee Performance VS Employee Productivity

Performance is more complicated than productivity.

For example, most businesses measure productivity by output. You know, like the number of units produced, sold, or delivered in a month. An unmotivated or untrained employee can still be productive, but much of their output may be poor and inaccurate.

As grandparents everywhere told us, “prevention is better than cure”. Because correcting quality after the fact is always more expensive and inconvenient than getting the job ‘done right’ to begin with.

Holistic Employee Performance Evaluation

In an evolving business, it’s essential to be able to distinguish between productivity and performance. Here are a few other attributes you should include in your employee performance evaluations:

• Interest — does the employee have a true passion for what they do?
• Relationships and collaboration — does the employee work well with their team?
• Growth mindset — is the employee willing to learn and make changes to benefit their team and the organization?
• Motivation — what is intrinsically and extrinsically motivating this employee?
• Unique qualities — how does the employee distinguish themselves from others in their role, and is their unique personality and skill set being leveraged fully?

Often, performance reviews are also considered an opportunity to reprimand employees for mistakes. The problem is that, in the case of yearly reviews, these mistakes may have happened months ago, and have been forgotten.

When performance reviews are far and few between, only the most recent behavior and attitudes are taken into account. This phenomenon is called recency error and can result in an incomplete, and often inaccurate, view of employee performance.

Another error that may happen is when managers unwittingly allow sentiment and gut-feel to have too much sway in employee performance evaluation. This can lead to mistakes that can derail both careers and business objectives.

To prevent these kind of errors, performance assessments need to happen both often, and using supportive performance evaluation tools, such as Management by Objectives (MBO) and 360 Degree Feedback.

Management by objectives

To find your objectives, you’ll want to work with employees to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Do this at the start of the quarter, and allow time for feedback on the KPIs themselves. This helps employees to understand, and to invest in the goals they commit to achieving. It’s important to set productivity goals, like “answer 4000 tech support tickets per month”, but equally important to set quality goals too, like “achieve a 90% satisfaction rating on customer surveys”.

Don’t forget to tie these goals to the broader team goals and strategic objectives of the organization. Every employee should be able to draw a clear line between their own performance, and the organization’s performance.

360-degree feedback

Employees should never leave a formal employee performance appraisal feeling that their work evaluation is determined by their manager alone. Instead, fair and effective evaluations take the perspectives of the employee, their peers, and customers into account.

You can get peer-feedback by conducting detailed surveys with at least two close colleagues, or a less detailed survey to the larger team. Make sure to consider the role of anonymity in such feedback, to ensure honesty and transparency. Decide on standard metrics for these surveys, and ask peers to rate specific aspects of each other’s performance on a numbered scale.

You can also use similar surveys to get feedback from clients and customers and include it in your employee performance evaluations.

Making It Effective

Bad data is worse than no data, and can’t be used to make sound decisions. So how do you make sure that the KPIs you’ve set, and the metrics you’ve used to rate employee performance, are actually useful?

Firstly, make your metrics distinct. For example, don’t ask peers to rate an employee against both their teamwork skills and their collaboration skills in the same survey. Be sure to review and adjust these metrics after each review period. This is to make sure that they’re still aligned to the organization’s changing goals and the employee’s changing role expectations.

Provide custom metrics (such as survey questions) that are tailored to each role. For example, presentability may be key in the performance of front-desk personnel, but not software developers who work remotely.

Train managers in basic data literacy. This includes an understanding that numbers usually don’t tell the whole story, and should be interpreted together with verbal feedback and context.

Even where anonymity is provided, have a clear record of where feedback stems from, so that potential biases can be considered.

Finally, measuring performance is only valuable if you take action.

Improving Employee Performance

With management shifting their focus, and publications like Fast Company even likening modern management to coaching, managers are expected to provide employees with opportunities and support to improve performance.

Motivation is key to employee performance improvement, and training can be time-consuming and draining. This is where eLearning offers an engaging, more customizable platform for training and improving employee performance.

One of the top benefits of online learning is convenience. Accessing resources and activities at one’s own pace (and place) significantly eases the burden of training on the employee.

Using a Learning Management System (LMS) with the right features (i.e. gamification and video support) also creates an ideal learning environment for employees. For administrations, an LMS’s reporting features help you correlate activity on the LMS with performance on training goals.

Employee performance evaluation and training are two sides of the same coin. So help your employees to address their performance gaps by giving them access to convenient, enjoyable training as the business evolves. And if eLearning can help you achieve this, make sure you choose the best.

Nikos Andriotis has two decades of professional experience in education, IT and eLearning. He holds a degree in Informatics and his writing has been featured in dozens of tech industry publications. Currently, he shares tips and insights about online training and other business-related topics for TalentLMS.