Employee performance is often viewed as separate from organization business goals. This is a siloed way to view performance. Instead of viewing them separately, treat employee performance as a leading indicator of your organization’s performance against its business goals. If your people are excelling, so will your business. Here are five ways you can measure employee performance, and motivate and retain your top talent.
1. Encourage Self-Evaluation
Employees should always understand where their performance ranks against themselves, their peers and the organization. Asking employees to self-evaluate is a great way for employees to get honest with themselves and their manager about how they are doing and can often lead to:
- Less surprises during a performance review cycle
- Empowering employees to set career growth goals for themselves and to share them with their leadership
- Maintaining employee motivation through performance management
Self-evaluation is a great way to introduce employees to a constant performance management cycle and for employers to begin to measure employee performance from a first person perspective.
2. Establish Performance Milestones
Whether an employee is a high performer or underperforming, setting milestones for that employee to help them reach the next “stop” on their career journey helps
- Keep employees and employers aligned on an employee’s career journey
- Employers manage underperformance in an objective, process-driven way
- Managers measure employee performance over time
Performance milestones can range in size and scope. It could be completing a big project on time, or it could be gathering skills or experience to earn a promotion. Milestones provide data points for organization, or even departmental performance tracking.
3. Use Gift Cards to Reward High Performers
Rewarding high performers gives them the special treatment that keeps them motivated throughout their career. Engage2Reward™ Choice Cards provide a flexible gift that fits any budget and allows the recipient to choose from 250+ eGift card brands from which to redeem their gift in the Engage2Reward™ Gift Card Ordering Portal. Gift card rewards are meaningful because they can’t be used like cash to pay a bill. They need to be used in a special, memorable way that keeps employees motivated and productive throughout the year. The Engage2Reward™ Choice Card also offers:
- Customization to add personalized messages for recipients, and the ability to upload a custom greeting card, photo or video
- Easy and instant digital delivery of the gift for timely employee rewards via email or text
Employee rewards are an effective way to maintain high performers and drive employee motivation both for the employees who are rewarded and those who see the reward and recognition happen. Engage2Reward™ Choice Cards provide the ultimate employee reward, allowing employees to choose a reward that fits their lifestyle.
4. Map Employee Goals to Performance
As you establish milestones for your employees’ careers, be sure to map those goals and milestones to their employee performance. For example, if an employee wants to work towards a promotion (the goal), provide guidance to what they need to do in their day-to-day performance to achieve that goal. Mapping goals to performance:
- Helps level-set employee expectations regarding their career trajectory
- Provides objective guidance for employee’s upward mobility
- Provides company-wide data points on both company goals and current performance.
- This can fuel succession planning and leadership development initiatives.
Making the connection between day-to-day performance and what employees need to accomplish to achieve their longer term goals will keep employees motivated and on-track in between review cycles.
5. Track Organization Performance Trends
Tracking employee performance is great for employees and for teams, but understanding how your whole company is doing in terms of employee performance can help establish
- If you have the right team in place
- Areas of strength and weakness within your organization
- Employee performance over time and company evolution
The reason to measure employee performance and to file employee performance reviews is to understand holistically how your company is doing. Don’t forget to look at the whole company picture of performance.
Conclusion
Measuring employee performance should be a constant company initiative. No employee should have to wait until an annual performance review to get feedback from their manager or to understand how they are doing. Encouraging self-evaluation and rewarding exceptional performance are great ways to keep employee performance measurement top-of-mind throughout the year.
Motivate your top performers with the Engage2Reward™ Choice Card today!
