How to Monitor Employee Performance in Small Businesses

Are you a small business owner or an HR manager in an organization? If yes, you might face the urge and necessity of monitoring employee performance in the organization. Here in this article, we intend to explore how to monitor employee performance in small firms.
Definitely, a major concern of every manager is to ensure every person contributes positively towards the achievement of the organization’s objectives. Often, the organizational objectives highly depend on managerial efficiency. And if you are a small business owner who is taking care of the employees then you have the responsibility of monitoring the employees’ performance in your organization.
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Actually, you have to ensure organizational effectiveness through the full utilization of the human resources available. Basically, through the performance appraisal process, you can measure and evaluate an employee’s behavior and accomplishments for a fixed time period. The major purpose of measuring and evaluating is to assess the worth or value.
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Benefits of Performance Appraisal for Monitoring Employee Performance
Basically, performance appraisal is a systematic and objective way of judging the relative worth or ability of an employee. Additionally, it helps to identify those who are performing their assigned tasks well and those who are not and the reasons for such performance.
Therefore, it is the process of reviewing individuals’ performance and progress in a job. Additionally, you can assess his or her potential for future improvement. Basically, it is a systematic method of obtaining, analyzing, and recording information about your employees.
- Performance appraisal is a must for the efficient management of a business or organization.
- It helps the manager to improve the job holder’s performance and plan his or her career.
- Also, it assists the employees to evaluate their own performance and develop themselves.
How to Measure Employee Performance?
Most performance appraisal systems help to measure individual job performance. However, defining job performance in an organization at the individual level is often a difficult process. You can attempt the following assumptions.
- If you can measure the production, there is less need for employee appraisal. Because you can judge each person according to the amount of produce. However, if you can’t do that, you must determine the personnel characteristics that lead to productivity.
- Basically, traits and characteristics can be perceived, isolated, measured, and evaluated. You can accept work quality, reliability, cooperation, knowledge, initiative, attitude, learning, responsibility-taking ability, etc.
- Also, you can carry out a client survey. The consequences of poor employee performance will ultimately manifest themselves in customer service. Through a client survey, you can quickly identify issues with individuals. A positive response means your employee performance is meeting or exceeding expectations.
Therefore, the success of performance appraisal measurement rests on specific job performance criteria. However, it is extremely important to select the performance criteria only after defining the job content.
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Things to Consider in Monitoring Employee Performance
Basically, validity and reliability are the two major aspects that can affect the performance appraisal system. Therefore, you must be aware of the problems that can affect the validity and dependability of the PA system.
- The tendency of the evaluators to base assessments of all individual characteristics on the raters’ overall impression of the person being evaluated is termed ‘the halo effect’. Basically, it is the tendency to generalize from a predetermined overall impression for the appraisal of specific traits and characteristics.
- Very often, your appraisal may become invalid because of your own biases as an appraiser. Generally, biasedness comes for several reasons such as regional or religious backgrounds, social or interpersonal conflicts, etc.
- There may be a tendency of inflating ratings. It may happen at times or overtime or at all times with some raters.
- Another aspect is the central tendency. Basically, this is the tendency to avoid using the extremes of rating scales and to cluster the ratings around the midpoint.
- Leniency error occurs when the rater artificially assigns all or a certain group of employees high-performance ratings and all or certain scorer clusters at top levels of the management scales.
- Finally, strictness errors can affect the appraisal system. It occurs when the rater artificially assigns all or certain groups of employees low-performance ratings, and all or certain scores cluster at the bottom levels of the measurement scales.
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You must carry out monitoring of employee performance on an ongoing basis. Basically, poor performances and negative behaviors can destroy the overall structure of an organization. Therefore, have the plan to address the issues you discover in monitoring employee performance in your organization.