Effective Monitoring Of Team Performance: A Helpful Guide

Your business largely relies on its employees. Every employee plays a role in the business, from the receptionist to the management staff, that ensures team performance is on par with your expectations. While you expect your employees to perform their tasks and offer excellent performance, these expectations are not always met. 

This is why it is essential to monitor employee performance. Effective ways to monitor employees can pay off in the long run, help you identify opportunities for training, and ensure you can address underperforming staff. We’re looking at how you can monitor team performance more effectively in this post.

Setting Goals For Employees, Teams, And Departments

One thing that can ruin business performance is failure to provide employees and teams with proper goals. When you do not give people goals to strive toward, they are unsure of what they need to achieve. This can cause poor performance among departments and individual staff members.

Thus, successfully monitoring employees starts by setting out goals. Each department has a critical role to play within the entire organization. This means a personalized approach is required with goal setting.

Here are some examples of how different goals should be set for various departments:

• Sales Department: Close 50 sales every month as a team, with each member contributing at least five sales per month to this goal.
• Marketing Department: Bring in 250 qualified leads every month. You could also break this down into a specific goal for specific employees who form part of the team or department.
• Customer Service Department: Improve the customer experience rating on the company’s public profiles by 0.5 starting within the next six months. Reply to customer queries within one hour. Aim to close tickets within 24 hours.

These are all realistic and trackable goals. Your teams know what you expect them to achieve, so they can start working toward every goal you set for them. This type of system can also promote cooperation among the staff members. While each member has a personal goal, there is also a team objective that they need to work toward together.

The specific goals that you will set highly depend on the business you run. Current data in terms of sales, marketing, and other departments need to be taken into consideration to allow you to set up realistically achievable goals.

The Use Of Employee Monitoring Software

Monitoring performance in a business is a challenging task. You need to be able to monitor on a per-employee basis while also keeping track of teams and the entire business overall. While manual tracking used to be the way to go, in the modern day, businesses are turning to digital software to make monitoring performance easier, more efficient, and to gain greater accuracy. Digital software also helps minimize the risks of errors, which could lead to poor decisions.

Concerns About Monitoring Software

When tracking performance with monitoring software, you need to keep a few things in mind. Your employees need to feel comfortable with the tracking software.

In one survey, it was found that about 24% of employees who are monitored by their employer were not aware of this. Another 25% of respondents reported that only verbal communication methods were used to inform them of employee monitoring within their company. Employees have rights, so you must ensure you notify your employees in writing about the use of monitoring software.

The same survey also found some concerns with using employee monitoring software. More than 70% of employees have reported that monitoring software feels like an invasion of their privacy and negatively affects trust in the workspace. Increased levels of stress and feeling pressured to work overtime were also noted in the survey.

The Advantages Of Monitoring Software

Even though there are specific concerns you should be aware of, it doesn’t mean you cannot monitor the performance of your teams. Sending out written notifications and providing training on how the monitoring software works can help provide better confidence and understanding among those who express concern.

Now, let’s consider what advantages monitoring software and strategies can offer:

• You can gain more insight into various business operations that are conducted within the company on a daily basis.
• It’s easier to identify different performers in your business. For example, monitoring helps you differentiate between different teams’ low and high performers.
• You’ll also find tracking the time employees spend at work is easier. This ensures you can compensate employees who work overtime effectively.
• You can identify areas where you can improve time management by tracking performance. This helps to improve the allocation of work time for different employees.

Choosing The Right Monitoring Software

It’s clear that monitoring software can give you more insight into employees’ work and how they perform. You can determine which team members require more training or those that are not performing as expected.

However, you need to ensure the monitoring software you choose is appropriate. There are a couple of solutions that you can use, including suites that allow you to track more than just employee time and performance. This can help you set up a dashboard with project plans, activity logs, and the ability to obtain actionable insights.

Here are a couple of things you should keep in mind when you choose tools to use:

• The type of time tracking solutions that are implemented in the software.
• Whether there are any self-monitoring tools that team members and managers can use.
• The type of reporting available options.
• The ability to track mileage for employees on the road.
• Expense tracking for employees who have a company card.
• The type of integrations that the software offers.
• Human resource features that are implemented in the software.
• Where you can access the platform, such as on desktops and mobile devices.
• Whether the software syncs with the cloud to provide easy access, even for those not at the office.

What Data Should You Track?

Employee privacy is essential, so you must ensure you know what data you will track. You must disclose the data you track in a written notification sent to your employees. Before you can do this, however, you first need to plan things out.

Some of the data that you should consider tracking:

• Tracking of activities on the company’s internal network.
• Collect data regarding emails sent from your company’s corporate email addresses.
• Attendance for employees, as well as the scheduled work hours.
• Usage of apps and websites within the organization.
• Tracking of logins from employees and managers.
• Collection of activity logs for employees who work out of the office, such as those who attend in-person meetings with clients.

Implementing Monitoring Software To See How Employees Work And Perform

You’ve decided to start using monitoring software to better view employees, HR, and other managers that form part of your business. Now, it is time to learn how to implement the software.

First, choose which software you are going to use. This is an important step. If you already use software to manage your business, see if there are integrations. This can help you find ways to monitor the progress of tasks and employees without learning how new software works.

The next step is to configure the software. If there are subscriptions on the software you choose, you need to choose a plan suited for your progress monitoring requirements. Ensure the plan offers the most effective ways to monitor what matters in your business. Start the initial configuration process by entering your business details, adding metrics you want to track, and providing critical data on employees that will be tracked with the software.

A root cause of employee dissatisfaction in the case of monitoring them is failure to inform them. Advise every manager in your business to officially inform employees that you are implementing tracking software. Make sure employees know it is to help create a more productive workforce.

Make sure your employees know how the software works. This will allow them to check in on a mobile app or desktop dashboard and check out when they leave. If employees need to send reports regarding their progress while working on projects, then ensure they know how these functions of the software work too. Productivity can only be boosted when employees do their part – and they need to be educated before they can effectively comply with these new regulations.

Use Self-Monitoring Tools

People who work for you often want to make improvements in their careers. They may want to aim for a better position that pays more in the future.

In addition to using a comprehensive monitoring solution, consider giving your employees access to self-monitoring tools. You can provide these tools to the employees to use anonymously on their own, as this may help them improve their productivity even more.

Personal self-monitoring tools allow employees to state specific goals they would like to strive toward. Perhaps you tell the employee they need to close 20 deals by the end of the month, but they know they are capable of closing 25. This could be a personal goal they set for themselves – which is both something career-wise and a financial achievement if they are paid commissions.

Providing support during this process can be helpful. Get professionals to help employees learn about practices that they can use to improve their performance. This could include training on the latest sales strategies or marketing trends that are changing.

How Rewarded Benefits Help Team Performance

Now that you know methods to monitor staff performance effectively, it’s essential to understand how to use the data to improve.

You can use different strategies to motivate employees and get better performance. Research shows that offering rewards for outstanding performance is an excellent strategy. One business report explains that using rewards in the workplace can go a long way. These rewards can even lead to improved gains for the business itself.

When a team member is awarded for their performance, it harbors confidence in what they do. It also shows the employee your appreciation for the work they do. This can help to further boost the employee’s performance in the future – as they would continue to strive for more rewards while doing their job.

One way of incorporating a reward system is through the use of gamification. This method uses game elements in a corporate environment. There are various ways to monitor staff performance with gamification. The process also cultivates friendly competition in the work environment, further driving employees to do their best.

Gamification can also be integrated with the existing monitoring solutions you use. It will support the data you collect to ensure you can make better choices when promoting employees, handing out rewards, and deciding when a specific staff member needs to improve their performance or face a replacement. You’ll use data from the gamification solution and internal tools together to determine performance and productivity regularly.

Spinify Can Help

By monitoring your employees, you gain valuable insights into their performance and can identify areas for improvement. This allows you to stay informed and make informed decisions that help you reach your goals more effectively. With the help of performance management and monitoring, you can gather intelligence and take positive steps toward improving engagement and performance in your business. 
Luckily, Spinify offers gamification software that can inject fun and excitement into your internal sales process, helping you to improve employee performance meaningfully. If you’re interested in learning more about how gamification can benefit your business, book a demo with Spinify today!