An organisation’s employee performance is the backbone of success. Whether that comes with cultural, financial or environmental benefits, when a business’ workers function well, it has a positive effect on all other aspects.

Yet, simply knowing that your company is doing well doesn’t necessarily indicate what area is or isn’t performing. To maintain success in the long term, it’s important to know what drives performance within your organisation, something that effective measurement can help with.

To approach performance management, there are some key things you need to consider first:

1. Be clear about your vision

The very first thing you need to clarify is where exactly it is you want to go with the organisation in the future. What determines success and what explicit targets do you need to set to reach the end goal?

Once you know the direction the business needs to move towards and have defined the strategic vision for each department, the process of managing delivery becomes much easier. As such, aligning strategic goals with day-to-day operations is important.

2. Define what to measure

The next step you should take after identifying the business’ overall vision is to decide what exactly needs to be measured to track performance.

If your organisation’s purpose is closely linked with excellent customer service, for example, you might want to consider measuring the following:

• The number of complaints received.
• The percentage of incoming calls answered within a given timeframe.
• The conversion rate of sales.

The key thing about measurement is that there is no wrong or right way of doing it. Instead, you need to determine which exact measure best enables you to improve your insight into the business’ performance.

3. Assign responsibility

Having a vision and setting measurement metrics is all good and well, yet without assigning someone the responsibility of overseeing progress, it’s unlikely that you will achieve success. Delivering on a plan is possibly the most crucial part of measuring performance. Hitting targets is driven by having someone accountable for results.

With this, you also need to make sure that employees have the resources they need to perform to the standard you require. Regular reviews by the key responsible staff member can help you further determine how the business is progressing.

Performance measurement can be a challenging and complex business aspect to measure. At Strategic Pay we can help you navigate through the entire process of defining your vision and goals right through to implementing and tracking performance.