Employee performance is crucial to organizations. If employees do not perform well, they put their teams, departments, and companies at danger. However, many employers still struggle with the right way to measure and improve their employee performance.

In this article, you will learn how HR Professionals define employee performance, how they most commonly measure it, and biggest influences on employee performance. Most importantly, you will find out how you can increase employee performance in your organization!

🎯 Before you continue, check out our Recognition and Rewards Solution Buyer’s Guide to implement employee appreciation best practices in your entire company – and see your employee performance rise.

Employee Performance Definition and Measurements

Simply put, employee performance is an indication of how employees fulfil their tasks. Employee performance has several dimensions – quality, quantity, efficiency, and consistency. It is closely related to employee productivity, although these two terms are not quite the same.

Naturally, it is in companies’ interest to enhance its employees’ performance. In order to improve it, employee performance should first be measured. Here are the top four ways to grasp how well your employees are performing.

Quality 

Is the work your employees complete of high quality? Are employees putting maximum levels of effort into their work? Are their goals and KPIs met?

These are the questions that can help you determine the quality of your employees’ performance.

Quantity

It is good when employees focus on the quality of their work – but as long as that work is completed on time. This is why you need to track if goals are being met on time, and help your employees increase their output if not.

Efficiency

Efficiency could be perceived as an intersection of quality and quantity. If employees produce high-quality work in minimal time frames, it proves that they are very efficient in what they do. 

However, the optimal employee performance does not equal burdening your employees with too much work despite their efficiency – everybody needs some time to rest.

Consistency

Do employees consistently perform their work well, or do you see significant highs and lows throughout the week, month and year? Pay attention to this aspect of performance, as it could help you conclude what impacts your individual employees’ performance the most.

6 Biggest Influences on Employee Performance

Grasping employee performance is complex. It is composed of various factors that have different weight for different employees. However, if you do not know what influences your employees’ performance, it will be hard to optimize it.

🎯Employee surveys are useful tools in finding out what drives your employees to do their best, as well as in detecting potential challenges. Browse through the most revealing employee survey questions and find out what your employees really think.

Here are the biggest influences on employee performance.

Knowledge, experience, & skills

Naturally, one of the biggest influences on employees’ performance are their knowledge, experience, and skills they already possess. Employees without any of these three will most likely perform poorly. 

This is exactly why it is crucial to offer training to employees that are advancing to more demanding roles. Moreover, it shows the value of hiring the right candidate for the job.

Motivation

When employees are not motivated to do their job, their performance will naturally be lower. Luckily, there are many ways to motivate employees.

Some employees will be more extrinsically motivated – by salary, for example – while others are intrinsically motivated: they just love doing what they do. However, employee motivation is a complex issue itself – so jump to our next chapter to find out how to motivate employees, and thus enhance their performance.

🎯Find out how to boost your employees’ motivation with these ten tricks.

Health and wellness

Did you know that mental and physical health are “found guilty” for 84% of direct, and 93% of indirect losses in productivity? Imagine the effect this has on employees’ performance!

However, there is a lot of talk about both mental and physical health in the workplace, especially after COVID-19 pandemic.

Psychological resilience

In order to maximize their performance potential, employees need to build psychological resilience. In 2021, 40% of US employees reported their jobs were extremely or very stressful. 

Although employees must learn to cope with stressful situations better, employers should ensure that those situations are reduced to a minimum.

Ability to work well in a team

In an interconnected world like ours, efficient collaboration and communication are crucial for businesses. As employers are seeing benefits of collaboration, they are looking for employees that will cooperate successfully to achieve the best end results.

Therefore, if employees depend on teamwork to achieve their individual goals but they do not have good collaboration skills, their performance will suffer.

Management factors

Direct management is probably one of the biggest influences on employee performance. Ever heard of micromanagement, or lack of feedback? It is no wonder that one in two employees have left their jobs to get away from their managers.

How To Increase Employee Performance

The secret to unlocking your employees’ potential lies in creating a positive employee experience. Also, groundwork for optimizing employee performance includes taking care of company culture, thus making your company a place where employees feel safe and productive.

🎯Before you continue to learn how you can increase employee performance, get these five essential steps for creating a strong workplace culture.

Encourage training and development

Workers cannot improve their work without their employers’ assistance. If you want better employee performance, you must give your workers guidance and training.

Ensuring employee development will have a double effect on your employees’ performance. First, it will ensure your employees learn new skills so they can do their jobs better. Second, since most employees want development opportunities, they will be more motivated, thus indirectly improving their performance.

Communicate often and clearly

According to McKinsey, employees’ productivity increases by 25% when they are connected. Moreover, ineffective communication causes stress for workers, which is counterproductive. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are applying employee communication best practices in your company, which include:

• Enabling access to information from multiple devices – laptops, mobile phones, etc.
• Involving C-level leadership into your internal communication strategy
• Preventing information overload
• Audience segmentation
• Encouraging more communication within teams.

Recognize your employees’ work

One of the best ways to inspire better employee performance is through appreciating your employees’ work. Did you know that 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated?

Furthermore, research suggests that the best ratio of positive to negative feedback is 5:1 if you want optimal levels of employee performance. Here are some ideas to recognize your employees’ work:

• Don’t miss a chance to mark your employees’ work anniversaries
• Send out employee appreciation letters on occasions of important achievements
• Identify and celebrate moments that matter
• Choose and reward your employees of the month.

Redesign your benefits policy

If there is one thing that pandemic has taught organizations around the world, it is that remote work is here to stay. Not only did employees adapt to the work-from-home model, but many also want to keep working remotely or at least in a hybrid arrangement.

After all, many employees are more productive working from home, which in the end affects their performance. So, try to see if your employee benefits package needs to be updated – and include hybrid work options into the benefits bundle.

Give feedback continuously

If we had to single out one thing that has the most profound effect on employee performance, it would be employee feedback. A whooping 92% of employees agree that when delivered correctly, negative feedback is an effective way to improve performance.

Continuous, informal feedback on their work is especially important to Millennials and Gen Z in the workplace. These generations rely on approval of their efforts in order to enhance their performance.

There are multiple ways in which managers and leaders can deliver feedback – here are our employee feedback best practices for managers. It is important to remember that positive feedback needs to outweigh negative one. Moreover, it is important to learn how to deliver constructive feedback for it to have a lasting, redirective effect.

Also, many employers still practice only the annual performance reviews, while in reality, performance should be reviewed much more often. In order to be effective, employee performance reviews need to be regular, fair, and consistent – that is why it is best to use employee evaluation forms every time.

🎯 Allow seamless feedback experience for your employees with FeedBck. Read how our real-time, 360 degree feedback solutions has helped our clients’ boost their employees’ performance.

Want to Boost Your Employees’ Performance?

You probably get it by now – improving employee performance takes a 360 degrees approach. This could pose a significant challenge to many organizations – unless you have guidance and tools that work for you.

Semos Cloud has been serving enterprise clients with complex infrastructure for years. We are happy to be transforming employee experience in many organizations that see their engagement and retention rates increasing after implementing our software.

If you want to enhance your employees’ performance, get in touch with our team and reap the benefits of exceptional employee experience our solutions offer.