Right off the bat, since the pandemic has struck, the employees had to adapt to working remotely within no time. It is no secret that not many organizations had given their employees to work from home pre-pandemic, and thus the transition wasn’t smooth for them. Work from home is no longer a privilege, but the way everyone is working now is the new 9 to 5 job. This has really made organizations rethink the concept of full-time.

Now that people are working from home, it is no longer necessary for them to work 8 or 9 hours straight. They can divide their work throughout the day, and still be productive. That being said, the main challenge that companies are facing, is how they can measure the performance of their employees, without seeing them working in the office. The most genius way to tackle this dilemma is by creating a strategized and robust performance management system. In this piece, we will give you the top 6 tips by which you can track your employees’ performance successfully.
1. Measure & Assess
In a layman’s term, productivity is the measure of output per unit time. This is something you can apply directly to measure your employees’ performance. Different companies have different ways of operating, and thus you can come up with a system that works best for you. But one thing to remember during this is that the employees should also be aware of how their performance will be measured. Not only will this transparency strengthen their bond, but they tend to work harder.
2. Define KPI’s
Another challenge when it comes to measuring productivity is that different job roles entail different metrics, and thus judging them on the same basis won’t be fair. Your team may consist of workers who either do sales, or write content, or do something else. You can create KPIs for them individually, for example for the content writers it can be the words written per day, or blogs published, for the sales team it can be the leads they generated or converted. This kind of performance management system will help you track every team member’s productivity efficiently.

3. Reward & Awards
It has been a tough and challenging time for everyone, and being appreciated and getting rewarded can boost an employee’s productivity through the roof. You can conduct a weekly or monthly virtual meeting, where employees of the month are called out and rewarded. In such an unpredictable time, everyone can do with a little recognition and enhance their morale. Additionally, this creates a healthy competitive atmosphere, as everyone will try to work hard to achieve their milestone.

4. Performance Tracking Software
Using software will help in keeping everyone on the same page. The dashboard can be customized according to the employee’s job role. This will help the managers in being up-to-date with the tasks of their employees and know if they are ahead of their schedule or behind. An added benefit is the accountability it brings to the team. Since they know their work task is visible by their managers, they will try to complete their tasks before time.

5. Time Tracking
Tracking the hours your employees have worked every day serves as another useful technique. When you are working in an office, your hours are fixed, you know you are going to be working for those many hours. But while working remotely, it becomes hard to separate your work life from your personal life as there are many distractions. But this is something that every company should be considerate of. Instead of calculating the everyday working hours of an employee, they can do it weekly. The main agenda is that the work should get done, and the employees should be given the flexibility of how and when they do it.

6. Completion Time
It is productive to track the time taken by employees to complete their tasks, but it won’t mean much if you don’t have a benchmark to compare it to. By providing an estimate of when the task can be completed efficiently, you draw up a baseline for productivity. It is possible that your estimate might not be accurate and will either be too low or too high, but don’t worry, this is something that will give accurate results within a period of time. Using an estimation time will also help you in create ng the same benchmark for all members of the team.

Takeaway
We can all agree that work from home is here to stay for a long time, and thus it is crucial to establish a good performance management system to ensure that the company keeps running smoothly.