17 ideas for measuring employee effectiveness

Measuring your employees’ effectiveness is an important part of managing a team, and ensures your organisation is running at its most productive. Some roles are easier than others to evaluate, eg fundraising roles usually have quantifiable targets to hit and the effectiveness of these employees is purely based on performance against these goals. However, it can be much harder and more subjective to evaluate the performance of other employees, eg support staff. Below is a list of different metrics that you could use to evaluate employee effectiveness during appraisals.

When deciding which metrics to use, it’s worth bearing a couple of things in mind. Firstly, ask your employees how they measure their performance. They have the best knowledge about their role and what success looks like, and allowing them input into the metric used gives them ownership of the measurement process. Try to use a combination of objective (measurable numbers) and subjective (rating by a manager) measurements, and make sure you cover the whole of their role, to give you the full picture of how they are performing.

1. Management by objectives

This is probably the most common way to measure employee performance. Objectives are set periodically, eg each quarter, and reviewed at the end of the target period. Progress towards each objective is then scored and new goals set.

2. Use rating scales

For subjective measurements, such as cooperativeness, dependability and judgment, a manager can rate their employee on a scale of 1 to 10. The rating should be done at regular intervals and be consistent in both what it measures and the scale used, to track changes in staff performance. Use the job description to set criteria necessary for the role.

3. Focus on performance

To keep employees focussed solely on tasks which are critical for the success of the organisation, you can look at how much time they spend on other things, eg how often are they online or checking emails? How much time do they spend on admin? Do they often take personal calls at work? This can help identify more efficient ways of working. It is also interesting to look at productivity statistics at various times during the day, to see if there are any times where employees typically ‘slump’.

4. Ask staff to rate their own job satisfaction

Happier employees are usually more productive employees, and job satisfaction is a particularly important motivator for charity staff. This is also a very useful indicator about whether employees are likely to leave in the near future.

5. Track digital trails

Computer software increasingly allows managers to track their employees’ work, eg through keystrokes made, tasks completed or percentage of an employees’ time spent using a particular application. These metrics are especially useful for data entry or processing roles.

6. Team performance

Measuring the performance of a team as a whole, as well as the individuals within it, will help determine whether they work well together, and if a reorganisation may help boost productivity.

7. Peer appraisals

Other staff members in similar roles can be asked to rate an employee’s performance, on the basis that they know best what the job requires. This is also a good way to monitor an employee’s ability to work well with others.

8. External evaluators

The use of professional assessors who monitor employees during simulated or actual work activities gives truly objective results, but is probably not a realistic option for most not for profit organisations.

9. Quantity and quality

It is important to always make sure these measures are linked. For example, scoring call centre staff purely on number of calls fielded ignores whether the majority of these calls have a satisfactory outcome or not.

10. Cost effectiveness

If the employee has some control over their budget, this can be a useful indicator of performance.

11. Absenteeism / tardiness

Obviously, an employee is not performing when they are not at work. However, you must be careful not to discriminate in cases of absence due to sickness.

12. Creativity
This is difficult to measure but can be an incredibly important part of some roles, eg design or marketing and communications jobs. Ask an employee to keep a record of their creative work and use appraisals to go through examples and score them.

13. Feedback forms

Whenever employees have contact with either donors or service users, you can use feedback forms to track the success of the interaction and grade the staff member on their performance. Limit feedback forms to a couple of easily answered questions and you should get a sufficient flow of replies to establish a track record.

14. Mystery shopping

For staff who regularly interact with the public, eg supporter services, mystery shopping is a good way to track intangibles like knowledge, friendliness or helpfulness. Someone pretends to be a service user and uses a pre-prepared script to gauge the employee’s ability to deal with a certain situation.

15. Advocacy

Staff advocacy is particularly important for not for profit organisations, as it is important for employees to feel enthusiastic about their organisation’s cause. However, it can be difficult to measure. You could look at using net promoter scores for employees, based on their willingness to promote your organisation’s services or internal jobs.

16. Personal appearance/grooming

The key thing to measure here is appropriateness. Different roles will require different levels of personal appearance, depending on who the employee is in contact with, but it is important that employees know the standard that they are expected to adhere to.

17. Physical fitness

An increasing number of organisations are investing in their employees health and physical fitness, for instance with regular exercise classes. The idea is that healthier employees are more productive employees, and improvements in fitness can be tracked to correlate against increased productivity. However, this works best when employees are asked to track their progress themselves, as an employer doing so would be too intrusive.


Remember, it is never enough simply to measure the effectiveness of your employees. The key thing is to act on that information, so that the performance of your organisation as a whole improves.

5 ways to engage remote workers

It is increasingly common for employees to wish to work from home on the odd occasion, eg in cases like transport strikes or last year’s snowy weather, or on a permanent basis to give them a better work-life balance.  Many not for profit managers also have to manage ground staff based overseas or in distant locations.

This means that enabling and managing remote working is becoming increasingly important to not for profit organisations - 86% of third sector decision makers say it is their key technical challenge.

But remote working can lead to employees feeling isolated and demotivated, as well as leaving their line managers in the dark about progress.  How can you manage remote staff to make them an effective part of a team?

Why use remote workers?

One of the most common reasons for employees choosing to work from home is to improve their work-life balance, eg giving them time to pick their kids up from school.  Flexible working is one of the key benefits that attracts staff to a third sector organisation (as shown in TPP’s fundraising recruitment survey), so being able to offer remote working is a definite advantage in sourcing top-quality employees.

Working remotely is also traditionally perceived to improve efficiency, as employees are happier and less stressed.  BT claim that flexible employees who choose remote working are 20% more productive than their office-based counterparts, while absenteeism has been reduced by 60%.   Allowing primarily office-based employees to work from home on the odd occasion can also greatly improve morale and therefore productivity.

Remote working also opens up opportunities for people living with disabilities, who might find it hard to work if they had to travel to an office, helping to improve your organisation’s diversity and giving you a wider pool of potential employees.

Many not for profit organisations, particularly those working in international development, prefer to employ local staff who are native speakers to run their programmes overseas.  However, these employees are often ultimately managed from the UK.

Enabling employees to work from home can also allow money-conscious charities to save, as overhead costs are cut and productivity is maintained if staff cannot get in to work, as in last year’s period of snowy weather, in which snow absence rates in the UK were estimated to reach almost 14% and cost the economy £0.5bn a day.

1.  Hire the right employees

Managing your home workers to ensure they stay effective starts right at the point of recruitment.  Selecting the right staff is important – look for employees with previous successful experience of remote working and justifiable reasons for wanting to work from home.  Even if they are not office-based, it is still important that they fit with the organisation and team culture.

It is also important to make sure that contracts set down the terms of remote working clearly, and measures of performance are in place from the start.   Make sure these are consistent across all your remote and office-based staff to avoid generating resentment.

Also detail the parameters of this type of work arrangement. If employees are working off-site, how quickly do you expect them to respond to e-mails, pages or phone calls? Can they work a flexible schedule or do they need to perform their jobs during specific hours? What technologies will be made available to employees to facilitate working remotely? How many days a week can people telecommute? etc.  Not every position lends itself to a teleworking arrangement

The more effort you put into defining requirements such as these early on, the less complicated it will be to supervise people once they are off-site.  TPP Not for Profit has recruited many remote workers to the third sector, and we can offer great advice and help to organisations looking to recruit home workers.

2.  Keep remote workers included

Managing remote workers is all about inclusion – it is all too easy to overlook employees not in the office.  Include remote workers in all team meetings, either in person or via a conference call or on speakerphone, and make sure they are invited to staff events, even informal ones like team drinks.

Lack of opportunities to chat informally with colleagues can also hinder working relationships, as it makes it harder for fellow employees to build the rapport that helps with collaborative projects.  Encouraging all group members to hold frequent discussions can help to keep teleworkers engaged, even if it’s just to let everyone know that work is progressing to schedule.

Where possible, you should also encourage your remote workers to visit the office on a regular basis, eg for monthly catch-ups or for important group meetings.  This allows them to meet their colleagues face-to-face.  If this is not possible, organisation charts and staff profiles with pictures can help remote employees put faces to names.

3.  Train in steps

It’s important to make sure that remote workers aren’t forgotten about when it comes to staff training, both at the start and throughout their careers.

When office staff are trained, a manager can constantly oversee their progress and give instant feedback.  With remote staff, this process is much harder but can be avoided by training in chunks, or scaffolding.  Essentially, the training programme is split into steps and a new employee must be able to demonstrate that they are fully competent in each stage before they can progress.

Training this way means that a manager can be fully confident that their remote employee can handle tasks on their own without constant feedback and support.

4.  Set goals and monitor progress

It is usually necessary to have a more formal schedule of update meetings with remote employees than office-based staff.  Ideally, you should aim to have a quick daily phone call with each remote worker, followed by a longer weekly catch-up.

You need to be even more clear when setting goals for remote workers; making sure that the expectations of both parties are agreed at the start of each project and a schedule of formal contact to monitor progress is set.  There should be clear procedures in place for remote workers to follow and people to contact if things start to go wrong at any point.

When it comes to monitoring the productivity of remote workers, managers have an advantage, in that there is usually an extensive document trail to help them investigate concerns or problems, for example by checking when employees were logged into a network.

5.  Keep improving your processes

If you are successfully using remote workers, it is important to keep evaluating and improving your processes.  Feedback from both remote and office-based workers about how the situation is progressing is vital to make sure both sides remain happy.  New technology is constantly being developed that can help to make remote workers more integrated with the rest of the team.

Most importantly - don't distance yourself from team members. Be available to them, this will increase the trust they have in you and let's you show them that you respect them.

Examples

Some case studies on remote working from the not for profit sector:

ramsac Provide CHASE hospice care for children with Remote Working
NPC slashes ICT costs and risk to maximize its impact
Home-based workers fundraise for charity: Actionaid's NTT operation
Case Study: Merlin Life-saving Communications at an Affordable Price
Case Study: New Charter Housing Group
Case Study: ActionAid

The Pitfalls of Ignoring Poor Performance

Charities are continuing to feel increasing economic pressure and this is having a negative effect on staff morale.  60% of charity staff have experienced redundancies in their organisation, and 55% feel their workloads are getting heavier, leading to stressed and unproductive employees.  And with half of voluntary sector leaders expecting their organisation’s situation to worsen over the next 12 months, the situation is not likely to improve in the near future.

However, not for profit organisations can be reluctant to tackle poor performance in the workplace - only 57% of staff reportedly receive useful feedback on how they are performing.  With over 218,000 employment tribunal claims brought last year, and charities particularly vulnerable to claims, failure to manage underperformance can have serious consequences for charities.

In this article, TPP examines the most common reasons for failing to tackle poor performance, and why these are misconceptions.



"Nonprofits should be kind"

This is an extremely common problem in the not for profit sector.  Most charities recognise that their staff often accept lower pay than in the private sector but expect a higher level of job satisfaction.  Combined with the fact that charities exist to promote ethical values, this can often lead managers to want to be “kind” to their employees, and turn a blind eye to underperformance.

However, failing to tackle poor performance at an early stage is more often than not an unkindness, both for the organisation, whose effectiveness will suffer, and for the employee themselves, who will continue to underperform until their manager has to tackle the problem, which can be a set up for an unfair dismissal claim.  Unproductive employees are also usually unhappy in their job, and treating the problem can improve morale all round.  Being a supportive manager, who proactively handles performance and develops their employees, is not being unkind. Allowing people to fail is unkind.

“We need to follow this through by managing poor performance when it arises. Anyone who hides behind the charity mask on this one and feels it is not compatible with being nice to people is not being professional or businesslike - nor maintaining the charity ethos.”
Valerie Morton in Third Sector magazine


Fear of litigation

Charities are usually heavily reliant on their public image to bring in funding and volunteers, and so are reluctant to enter situations where litigation might result which will give them negative press.  Charity employees can be more willing than most to bring a claim against their employer if they feel they are being treated unfairly, as they have an innate sense of justice and fair play.  This means that voluntary sector managers can be unwilling to speak to employees about poor performance and scared of getting into situations which they feel may eventually lead to dismissal.

Once again, the solution to this is to tackle poor performance at an early stage, rather than simply ignoring it.  Properly handled, an employee may well improve their effectiveness, avoiding the need for dismissal.  But if it does get to that stage, an employee is more likely to feel aggrieved about being dismissed if their employee has not attempted to address and solve the issues leading to the underperformance, and will almost certainly have a stronger case at tribunal because of this.


Worrying about morale

In the current economic climate, when many charities have experienced downsizing, many managers are concerned about maintaining the morale of their team and fear that confronting an employee, particularly one that is popular with the rest of the staff, about their performance may lead to a wave of fear among the team and a drop in morale.

In this scenario, managers are assuming the worst.  Handling unproductiveness sensitively and at an early stage can lead to the employee becoming both more productive and more satisfied, which is likely to positively affect the rest of the team.  If this does not happen, and the process eventually leads to a dismissal, there certainly is a risk that the rest of the team will become worried, but reassurance and support can help to tackle this.  However, leaving that employee to carry on as they are will definitely lead to a drop in morale as the rest of the team have to make up the slack.


Extenuating circumstances

A common reason for underperformance can be personal problems that are unrelated to work.  If a manager is aware of these circumstances, they could very well be tempted to let poor performance slide on the assumption that the employee’s effectiveness will improve once the situation has been resolved.  However, simply ignoring the issue is doing the employee no favours.

Talking through the issue with the member of staff will alert them to your concerns, demonstrate your support in their situation and may lead to a mutually beneficial solution, such as allowing them to take a paid leave of absence.


Losing a star performer

Sometimes, an employee can be a high performer in numerical terms, but can still require performance management for unacceptable behaviour, such as negativity, dishonesty, harassment or bullying.  Managers may be reluctant to tackle this behaviour, even if it is having a negative impact on the rest of the team, for fear of losing their star performer.

Leaving this kind of behaviour untackled ends up sending a message to the rest of the staff that conduct like this is acceptable as long as targets are met.  Staff may become disillusioned and leave due to perceived unfairness.  Performance management should always have the welfare of the team as a whole in mind, not just that individual.


Conclusion

If your beneficiaries are likely to suffer due to a drop in team productivity and morale, is there really any excuse that could be valid for failing to deal with poor performance early on?  A good manager should be able to effectively communicate and document an employee’s poor performance in a timely manner, so that any disciplinary action is never a surprise. If it does happen, it should only be the culmination of a process where the manager is sincerely working to change an employee’s behaviour for the betterment of the organization.


Resources

Further advice on performance management and involuntary redundancy:
KnowHow NonProfit
CIPD
10 point checklist for confronting poor performance
Crash Course: Seven ways to manage poor performance

Training
CS Skills Centre - Managing poor performance
The Centre - Managing poor performance, absence and stress

Healthcare Conferences UK - Managing Poor Performance and Supporting Nurses in Difficulty

Forms & Templates
Various forms are available from HR Bird

Finally, for further guidance on how NOT to conduct a performance review, learn from the master - David Brent.