Within this article, you can expect to find advice and guidance on how to run an effective team performance analysis. This is a great source of knowledge for business owners, managers and project leads who are seeking to manage their teams better using automation.
Your employees are what make your company. It’s their work, alongside your guidance, that is the driving force in bringing the vision of your business to life. However, just as you track metrics that show you how far along you are, you also need to analyse the contribution of each team member towards it. And that’s what essentially the team performance analysis is. Although it sounds relatively easy, many companies find themselves at the loss of where to start and, more importantly, how to reap the benefits from their findings.
Since team performance analysis is crucial for every business that’s thriving to progress, we decided to extend an arm by offering some help. Below, we will pinpoint the starting point of the process, talk about different types of KPIs, highlight the key focus areas and share tips for improving long-term.
What Are Your Goals?
According to Simon Sinek, everything starts with a ‘why?’. When speaking of a team performance analysis, that’s a particularly important question to answer. If you have no goal to achieve, no matter how in-depth data you’ve collected, none of it will make sense. With no context, no metrics will point you in the right direction for bettering your results as you won’t know what the good results even are.
Before you can set your KPIs or measure your results, you need to have a strategy - and no strategy can exist without a goal. Therefore prior to you jumping into analysing your team’s performance, you should clarify what your goals, short and long-term, are. They will be your primary point for everything we are to talk about in this article, therefore we suggest you write them down on a piece of paper. If you’re at the very start of your journey and don’t have preset goals, we recommend you use the SMART goal system. Ready? Let’s move on.
Understand Your Key Performance Indicators
The ultimate pursuit of every organisation is to reach the highest possible level of performance by maximising their employees’ potential and creating an agile business environment. With high performance also comes high profit, but how exactly can you know if your team delivers? Experts identify two types of key performance indicators (KPIs): qualitative and quantitative. To find out if your team performs, you will need to set clear goals and track progress regularly by looking at these indicators.
Qualitative KPIs
Qualitative KPIs are subjective variables measured in opinions or traits. They refer to the way the organisation and its stakeholders perceive a certain team member. Here are some questions to ask when estimating qualitative KPIs:
-
Are people satisfied with that team member?
-
Do they generally get good feedback from colleagues and superiors?
-
Are they great communicators?
-
Do they work well in a team?
Another factor you should look at is the mentoring time: is the team member able to work and solve problems independently or do they need constant guidance and supervision? In other words, just like the name would suggest, these KPIs are meant to rate the quality of your staff’s performance. Although some of these can be calculated, like people’s satisfaction (via surveys, feedback forms, etc) - others remain intangible. For more precision and specific metrics, you will be setting and tracking quantitative KPIs - and this is our next section.
Quantitative KPIs
Quantitative KPIs are measured in numbers. They are based on more “objective”, tangible data, which is why you can easily monitor them with employee performance software. Here are a few indicators you should be tracking:
-
Time and presence;
-
Percentage of time spent on billable projects;
-
Timesheets and whether they’re being submitted on time;
-
The number of complaints.;
-
Average customer satisfaction rating.
These indicators can vary depending on the nature of your activity. For example, sales performance indicators are the easiest to measure, because you have the exact number of leads that the sales agent has turned into paying customers.
The Key Areas to Monitor
As you might have understood already, there is no limit to the types of KPIs you can track and they will ultimately depend on your goals. However, we think there are two areas that every business needs to keep an eye on. In fact, depending on your priorities, sometimes these two might be all you need as they’re heavily informative and easily actioned on.
Attendance and Work Quality
The main two main qualitative KPIs to track are attendance and quality. The primary gives you a good analysis of your office's mental health being and culture. For example, if an employee is frequently late for work, leaves early and takes too many sick days, that could mean they are unmotivated, burned out, unhappy with their workplace/workload or they may have a health condition that affects their performance. Meanwhile, if an employee is always on time and works overtime voluntarily, then they feel motivated and the company’s goals align with their own.
Work quality is measured by calculating individual performance towards team goals. The prime example of it being on a decline is an employee constantly receiving complaints from clients, being prone to missing deadlines or generally lacking the contribution. Mind, this isn’t something you should rush to fire them over - they may be assigned to the wrong task or require more training.
Contribution to Billable Projects
Every business needs to generate revenue to keep on existing. This is why it’s important to calculate and take into consideration what each team member contributes toward billable projects. Mind, different positions will have different metrics to judge their input on. However, since they all bleed into one another after you’re done with the individual metric assessment, it will be easy for you to identify the weak link.
For example, when evaluating a marketer, depending on your goals, you might be focusing on leads they’ve generated, their quality and the ROI generated if they’ve been successfully converted into customers. The sales, on the other hand, will be assessed on the number of deals closed their ratio to the qualified leads provided and potential upsells. Finally, the customer success and support will be analysed based on client retention, customer satisfaction and the company’s reputation. As you see, all three are ultimately part of the same process, while they each have different metrics to track. When put together, they paint a complete picture of how successful your client acquisition and retention strategy is.
Communicate to Achieve Goals
You’ve most likely heard the saying that communication is key - and it could not be more right. When it comes to something as communal as team performance, the channels, fluidity and smoothness of communication are the pillars your success relies on. Everyone on your team needs to understand and share goals, as well as trust one another. In other words, to succeed you need to strive for maximum team alignment.
Tips for Effective Performance Analysis
Sometimes, organisations are unable to reach peak performance because there was a problem in establishing their goal or communicating it to their employees. To prevent this from happening, make sure you do the following:
-
Establish reasonable goals that can be met. Aiming for extraordinary results in a short time frame can lead to disappointing results and low employee morale. Instead, create a timeline for reaching your main goal and divide it into several smaller, actionable steps.
-
Make sure every team member is aware of the organisation’s goal and the role they play in achieving it. Employees shouldn’t work aimlessly. They need to have a list of weekly/monthly/annual goals to work towards.
-
Use project management and time tracking software to measure team performance and work absenteeism. Relying on pen and paper is too inaccurate, takes a long time, and can reduce productivity.
Both qualitative and quantitative KPIs matter equally when measuring the performance of your team. Nowadays, organisations can use many tools to automate processes and track employee progress, but, first and foremost, you need to be clear in setting and communicating your goals.
Summary
Team performance analysis is an important process run to understand how is your business progressing towards its goals and what areas need addressing. However, it’s impossible to carry out unless the goals are clear and the entirety of the company is united on them. Lack of such clarity leads to haphazard metrics, tracking of which will consume your time and contribute to nothing.
Break your goals into smaller parts, such as KPIs - for both overall business and individual employee performance. By tracking and analysing them all, you’ll be able to gather clear insights on whether your business is on the right path, spot opportunities and forecast potential roadblocks. But most importantly, remember that team alignment and communication are the pillars of successful companies.
Getting ready for your next team performance review? Give us a call, we will aid you.
