VIDEO: Achieving Success: Top Performance Metrics to Track

In HR, how do you gauge how well your employees are doing? How do you tell if they’re fulfilling their role? Well, we use, Performance Metrics. You may have heard of “Key Performance Indicators” or KPIs and they, along with OKRs or “Objectives and Key Results” can help you figure out how well employees are doing at work. That said, using a single key metric to determine the success or failure of your company can be dangerous since you’d be missing out on a lot of contextual information that can highlight your employees’ contributions and value.

So let’s take a look at four different kinds of metrics that you and your company should be keeping tabs on, too. Let’s start with Quantity. Quantity metrics focus on the volume of work produced, sold, or executed by employees. For instance, a manufacturing company may track the number of units produced per hour to assess productivity levels. Although quantity metrics are important to monitor, they often don’t reveal much about how employees produce their work or the impact it has on the business.

For instance, perhaps Mary, a factory line worker, produces only five items one day compared to John’s 15. Those numbers reflect only surface-level data points — they don’t capture the fact that seven of John’s items were defective and unusable, or that Mary was suffering from a cold and still working. Thus, it’s best to evaluate quantity metrics while looking at other performance metrics to understand the full picture. What other metrics you might ask?

Well, like Quality. Quality metrics evaluate the excellence of work compared to established standard benchmarks. Companies often rely on customer feedback and industry standards to measure quality, ensuring that products or services meet or exceed expectations. Some examples of quality metrics include error rate, rate of return, or customer satisfaction score, otherwise known as CSAT. However, like quantity metrics, you can’t focus entirely on quality to paint a holistic picture of your company’s performance.

After all, one PERFECT product won’t make you much money unless you can make enough to turn a profit. Next up is Efficiency. Efficiency metrics analyze the ratio of input to output, or time and resources to products or services. Monitoring employee efficiency helps organizations optimize resource utilization and streamline processes for maximum productivity. Wasted time and/or resources equals wasted money, so ensuring everything is running smoothly and effectively is paramount.

Some examples of individual and organizational efficiency metrics include task completion, response time, cost per task, and human capital return on investment, or ROI. Last but not least, effectiveness. Effectiveness metrics measure the impact of employees' work on overall business outcomes. This metric assesses how well employees meet goals, manage priorities, and contribute to the company's success. These metrics tend to be bigger picture and function moreso on the company level, and less on the individual.

This would include metrics like average performance review rating, conversion rate, customer and employee retention rate, and eNPS or Employee Net Promoter Score. Performance management software like BambooHR, Lattice, or Trackstar can help you keep track of these particular metrics and set goals to make things easier on all fronts. You can learn more about those and other options by clicking on that first link in the description below. Thanks as always for watching, I’m Kyle, this is TechnologyAdvice, and I’ll see you next time. Bye!