“Team performance metrics should be the measure that will bring a win-win situation.”
Racking your team performance on a constant basis can be difficult. Team members roles and responsibilities vary from one person to another. Tracking metrics lets you improve overall results and align your people and processes with your organizational objectives. You need to build the team performance metrics that will bring benefit for all. These are some insights about team performance metrics you can follow through.
Skill
Skills are important in determining employee ability to perform his/her job. Employee development uses an employee's existing skill set and expands on it to help that employee perform his job more efficient. In the face of constant change, having a wide range of skills and nonstop development are helping a lot to make your team more resilient to any obstacles. You can assess the skill development easier from whether your employee keep improving or not. They will be considered as fail to earn this scope if they don’t proactively identify a skills gap and do something about it.
Initiative
This is how you measure how capable an employee solve a technical problem caused by technical issue or restricted information on the task. On solving any issue, they need to have a strong initiative. When someone in your team takes initiative, it’s definitely a sign of team satisfaction and engagement. They will be considered as fail to earn this scope if they didn’t have the initiative to ask the information gap on their task, so they can finish their task well on time. It doesn’t look good too if they gave up or they give less-than-required deliverable on a technical problem because “I don’t know how to do it" excuse.
Communication
The employee communicates well with both external (client assigned to them) and/or internally (their teammates). Communicate well means talk in crystal clear, with a simple language everyone can understand, in a timely manner. Communication can happen verbally or via group messages or email. They will be considered fail to earn this scope if they didn’t communicate to their team member of any issue that they have foreseen before. They also don’t live up the good measurement if they didn't ask about something that could possibly halt/delaying task deliverable.
Deliverable Quality
Team members who care about their efforts and engaged at work will likely perform better. So, it’s a good idea to recognize resulting achievements. As for this metric, high-quality deliverable consists of deliverable according to requirements. The deliverable result must be thoroughly tested for errors (in development) or typo (in design and others) as per required spec. For development deliverable, the test must assume a production environment or what would the client use it.
A good team members will deliver something that they would 100% love to use themselves. Team members will be considered fail to earn this scope if they constantly/multiple times send buggy deliverables in development. It will also be a mistake if they often have typo deliverables in design or other non-technical stuff. They will also be considered failed if they give deliverables that are imperfect even though they know it doesn’t make sense.
Punctuality
Missed deadline means missed deadline, whatever the reason is. To be punctual means to incorporate any possible foreseen obstacle that would delay employee deliverables so they would have a good understanding of what it would take to finish a task. Everyone in your team should have a clear information on the time limit and resources available. They need to be capable of prioritizing things to be done efficiently. Your team members will be considered failed to earn this scope if they missed the deadline, whatever the reason is. Missed deadlines mean we got lower output to the client, and they got lower output from us (employer).
The founder of Monitor Talent, Christopher Meyer, emphasized the importance of having a measurement system in 1994 Harvard Business Review.
"When a group of people builds a measurement system, it also builds a team. One benefit of having a team create its own measurement system is that members who hail from different functions end up creating a common language, which they need in order to work as an effective team.
Implementing performance metrics can be tricky. In principle, the system is meant to be useful for everyone to build an effective team.
Conclusion
Metrics should not be just a weapon, so you can place your authority over everyone, but as a tool to improve your team overall performance. Let the team performance metrics become the vehicle to a high-productivity and the best results your company can deliver. Use the metrics as attention to your team members, rather than a punishment. When you use them wisely, it will not only be your tool of success, but also your tool for a better work environment.
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References
https://risepeople.com/blog/5-metrics-team-member-performance/
https://www.typefinder.com/blog/how-do-you-measure-teamwork-4-metrics-measuring-team-performance