Let’s Review

Performance waxes and wanes throughout the year, it’s inevitable. As an executive, low performance is one of the worst things you can hear. But how on earth do you combat it? Sometimes it’s more complicated than a lazy manager or understaffing. Sometimes it’s something in the company itself.

It can go back to company culture for sure. Lack of rewards for doing their jobs well, no extra perks, an unfriendly environment, non-competitive wages. This is stuff you may be able to fix yourself. Maybe offer an employee of the month reward or bring in food on Friday or even remembering your employees’ names and stories.

You have some questions to ask yourself when it comes to measuring employee performance

How often do you evaluate employee performance and what is it based off of?

Sometimes if you check employee performance too often, you miss the bigger picture. An employee can have a bad week, but a great month. On the flip side, an employee can have a few mediocre months that turn into a pretty shabby year. It’s all about finding the balance. There should be at least two employee performance evaluations done a year. If you go an entire year without checking on employees, you may damage your own company by not being available to help solve problems quickly. If you are the head of a large company, every few months may not work for formal check-ins, so informal checks with a handful of employees every few weeks may help keep everyone up-to-date.

How do you check employee performance? Is it based on how much product they push out, how many sales calls they make a day, how many face-to-face meetings they attend? It should be a few different things because each employee probably has more than one responsibility. Sometimes hours worked does not indicate how hard someone is working. Maybe get feedback from their co-workers or clients your employee works with. Get some input because you cannot see everything that happens all the time. For a formal review, do your research, that way you and your employee are getting the most out of your time.

Putting in some extra leg work to make sure the reviews are well researched, will help you determine exactly how an employee is performing and help you understand what should change or stay the same in the future.

After all, how can you know what’s wrong if you never look?