Performance Tracking: 5 Best Strategies and Tools to Track Employee Performance

Without it, organizations risk a significant decrease in productivity and engagement. As you keep tabs on how employee progress is going and track outcomes, you'll be able to ensure that your teams are aligned with company objectives, putting effort into the right track.

We've written this article to help you do precisely that! Without further ado, let's take a closer look into what performance tracking is, what kind of strategies and tools you can implement to successfully monitor it, and why it's a good idea to be on top of it!

What Is Performance Tracking?

Simply put, performance tracking is the process of monitoring and measuring your workforce's progress, achievements, and areas of improvement. To do so, your process will involve setting clear goals, regular assessments, and more!

If your performance tracking efforts are effective, you'll be able to identify strengths and weaknesses, whilst promoting employee growth, enhancing productivity and employee happiness throughout your company, and reducing turnover in the process. To best approach performance tracking, we recommend utilizing appropriate software alongside your strategies. Let's get to it!

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Best Strategies For Performance Tracking

There are several essential strategies to implement in your workplace in order to make full use of performance tracking, let's take a look.

1. Set Realistic Goals

Setting realistic goals is the pillar of success. To effectively track performance it is vital that your goals are measurable and attainable, otherwise keeping track of them becomes an ordeal. Clear goals provide employees with purpose and direction.

When setting goals, it is important to make sure they follow the SMART goal framework. This approach will allow for the entirety of your workforce to monitor progress objectively and effectively, identifying which areas need improvement and adjusting timely.

Clear goals also promote transparency and accountability, which are important characteristics of a thriving workforce, and more importantly a thriving organization.

Set Cascading Goals & OKRs inside Microsoft Teams & Outlook with Teamflect!

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Setting cascading goals inside Microsoft Teams is quite easy! Simply head into the goals module and click on "New goal". After your goal is created, you can link new goals to your existing objectives as well as set up related tasks. This will create a sequence of goals and help get a clearer image of the steps that you need to take to reach your desired outcome.

With Teamflect's goals module, you can;

• Assign goals individually or as a group for multiple people
• Choose between different types of goals such as individual, group, department, or team.
• Customize how you wish to track the progress of the goal according to your choice of metric
• Tie your goal to a parent or sub-goal to create a cascading goal structure throughout your organization.

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2. Conduct Regular 1-on-1s

Regular one-on-ones provide your workforce with the opportunity to have a dedicated space where managers and employees can discuss progress, development opportunities, and challenges alike. Meetings in a one-on-one format promote open communication and allow employees to seek guidance and receive actionable insights.

One-on-ones also create a space for real-time feedback, helping address issues before they potentially escalate, or simply course-correct before alignment between employees and the organization is compromised.

In that sense, holding one-on-one sessions benefits employees and organizations alike, creating stronger relationships, boosting employee morale, and ensuring alignment between personal goals, and company objectives.

Utilize Teamflect's One-on-one Module!

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Teamflect's one-on-one module helps create a detailed outline of all of the performance details an employee has, preparing you for your meeting and providing valuable insight into which areas need improvement for your staff.

Teamflect's one-on-one feature allows for;

• Track goals / OKRs inside 1:1 meetings to ensure goal alignment.
• Set and manage tasks inside ongoing Teams meetings.
• Create comprehensive meeting agendas with recurring talking points.
• Take shared and private meeting notes to capture all the important details.

3. Track & Monitor Goal Progression

Tracking goal progression is essential in order to make sure employees stay on course, consistently contributing to organizational productivity and ultimately its success. Utilizing tools that help streamline this monitoring process will help offer real-time and actionable insights, highlighting areas that need addressing.

Consistent monitoring helps ensure the workforce is aligned with organizational goals as well as fostering a culture of accountability in that process, where both the organization and the workforce grow and thrive together.

Create Automated Goal Check-ins With Teamflect To Keep Up With Goals!

Teamflect helps streamline your goal tracking by integrating seamlessly into your Microsoft Teams chat. Goal owners receive notifications to update their goal progress at intervals of the goal creator's voice.  

Once set up, goal owners will receive goal check-in adaptive cards periodically. These adaptive cards will show up inside the Teams chat and can be filled out in seconds!

Using this seamless integration, goal owners will be able to update right inside the chat and you’ll be able to ensure that your goals are tracked consistently to make sure your data stays up to date, painting a clearer picture of how your performance is progressing.

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4. Assess Performance Through Regular Reviews 

Conducting regular performance reviews, similar to goal tracking, is a great way to keep up with employee performance. Creating review cycles will help provide comprehensive feedback on performance for your workforce, and make adjustments as necessary.

Consistent evaluations offer a chance for your workforce to reflect on their own performance as well with self-reviews promote accountability as well as well as encourage employee development.

Teamflect’s Performance Review Feature Allows For Consistent Evaluations!

You can seamlessly streamline your review cycles with Teamflect inside Microsoft Teams. With this module, users have the freedom to set up evaluation cycles that suit them best and utilize other features like surveys, tasks, goals, and meetings as they review performances.

This well-rounded approach helps provide a thorough evaluation experience for both managers and employees, supporting data-based decision-making and overall efficiency.

5. Recognize and Reward Achievements

Maintaining employee morale is essential throughout any performance tracking methods simply cause while you want to keep performances high, you also ideally wish to do so by encouraging and empowering your workforce.

Therefore, in order to achieve that, it is vital that you recognize and reward your employees for their hard work through performance-tracking practices. Consider offering tangible rewards as well as public praise to your employees so they feel appreciated and remain invested in putting their best work forward.

Recognize Your Workforce With Teamflect To Motivate and Engage Them!

We already highlighted how important it is to motivate your team to help encourage their best work. In that regard, Teamflect offers the perfect module.

Teamflect allows you to;

• Boost employee morale with various customizable recognition badges that reflect your company values accordingly.
• Create manager/admin-only recognition badges to recognize high-performers.
• Send private recognitions to celebrate success in confidential projects.

Why Should You Track Employee Performance?

Tracking employee performance plays a crucial role in driving business success in the long term. When employee performance is consistently monitored both the workforce and management gather invaluable insight that can potentially course-correct any operational efforts into the right path.

In doing so, tracking employee performance also helps provide constructive feedback, set clear and SMART goals, as well as offer support along the ride. This way employees have increased accountability over their work.

As you keep outcomes measurable and track progress, you will allow your workplace to be transparent and foster fairness in the organization, contributing greatly to employee engagement and retention rates. With many benefits seeping through tracking employee performance, there really is no reason not to, if you wish to enhance overall efficiency in your company.

Final Words...

Overall, performance tracking when practiced effectively, is the backbone of a high-performing entity. If you use the right strategies and tools, you'll be able to cultivate the right workspace where employees feel they belong.

Whether it be utilizing performance management software, setting clear goals, or conducting regular one-on-ones, each performance tracking method comes with its own benefits for long-term organizational success. Invest in performance tracking, and see for yourself!

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