Team members are the backbone of any professional service business. The more you can do to sharpen their skills, build their confidence, and boost their performance, the better your project and service delivery — and client satisfaction — will be. Of course, without the right tools in place, accurately measuring and assessing employee output can be overly complicated and inefficient.
Below, we’re discussing exactly how to measure performance and production metrics, as well as how to improve employee performance with Wrike for Professional Services.
How to measure employee performance
Without a clear understanding of precisely how your team members are performing, you can’t offer sound strategies or advice for improvement. This is why it’s critical to have a solid performance appraisal or review process in place for every employee on your team.
Of course, there are a variety of methods for evaluating employee performance. Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the most common performance appraisal methods:
- 360-degree feedback: The 360-degree method is great for developing a well-rounded, comprehensive review of employee performance because it calls for compiling feedback from managers, co-workers, clients, and subordinates. This way, team members can get perspectives from everyone they interact with and can pinpoint areas of strength as well as opportunities for improvement.
- Management by objectives: This method seeks to minimize subjectivity in the assessment process by establishing clearly defined goals for employees to work toward. With management by objectives, managers and team members identify and plan those goals, then follow up to discuss the progress that’s been made and any adjustments or corrective actions that need to be implemented moving forward.
- Subjective appraisal: The traditional subjective appraisal from a team member’s immediate manager is still a valuable method of evaluation. While metrics provide quantitative performance data, these need to be analyzed within the context of other, more qualitative features like character, interpersonal relationships, and customer service.
- Quantitative evaluation: With quantitative evaluation, employee performance is measured against predefined standards related to productivity, cost, time, and more. This appraisal method relies much more heavily on hard data and statistics that come from employee performance metrics.
What are employee performance metrics?
Simply put, employee performance metrics are the standards by which you measure the quality, quantity, and efficiency of your team members’ work. Here are some of the metrics commonly used to assess and analyze professional services employee performance:
- Billable utilization or utilization rate: This metric is an indicator of how many billable hours an employee logged, based on their contracted capacity.
- Number of errors or revisions: If your business provides software as a service or any kind of deliverable to clients, the number of errors in code or corrections in other work can serve as a performance quality indicator.
- Number of units produced: Here again, the measured units will vary depending on the specific service you provide. This metric serves as an indicator both of work quality and efficiency.
- Time and attendance: Perhaps the most fundamental employee performance metric is overall work attendance and time spent on projects or producing deliverables. Team members who take excessive amounts of sick leave, are consistently late to work, or frequently leave early are probably not meeting their full potential. What’s more, poor attendance can have a detrimental effect on other team members who are left to pick up the slack.
How to improve employee performance at work
At the end of the day, the point of measuring and evaluating these metrics is to improve employee performance and deliver the best possible results for your clients. That’s why Wrike for Professional Services comes equipped with the tools needed to streamline operations, ensure proper resource allocation, and monitor both team and individual employee performance to maximize the quantity and quality of output.
With Wrike for Professional Services, you’ll:
- Gain visibility into project resource requirements and availability and improve capacity planning with Wrike’s resource management tools
- Keep up with your team members by tracking billable and non-billable time in exportable reports for easy billing
- Improve employee performance by tracking metrics and KPIs with advanced analytics and project status dashboards
Ready to see how much simpler professional service management can be with the right software in place? Register below to get a free two-week trial of Wrike for Professional Services and start improving employee performance today!
Check out Wrike's Professional Services Guide for more.
