Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Tracking Performance

It is always important for us to track performance regardless of the task. We watch overall gross income performance, profit and loss, inventory costs, expenses, and all sorts of other performance indicators. We also watch job performance. We track tasks like phone orders taken per person, number of customer service emails sent, and number of web site updates made. It’s extremely useful to know what jobs are being done and how efficiently they’re being performed.

There are drawbacks to all this tracking though, and I didn’t understand much of it at first. I’m still learning too, but I’ll mention a couple of lessons that I learned here. For instance, I had to learn to really analyze the numbers to get the whole story. We started tracking our shipping workers’ numbers so that we would know how many packages they ship out per day per person. Sometimes a shipping worker’s numbers would be far lower one day. They might have been taking inventory or working on something still important, but not related to the single number we were watching. It was a problem. We’ve since learned to judge performance based on a number of factors, not just one.

Another issue with performance tracking is deciding how much information to provide to employees. The whole objective is to improve performance by tracking it, not to create contests or destroy quality in a wild dash for higher numbers. I’ve found that it’s best to track and privately review performance with employees instead of having the performance numbers sitting out there for all to see. We’re also trying to avoid the phenomenon where an employee hits their usual satisfactory target number and then slows down for the rest of the day.

It’s difficult to know what performance benchmarks to track and how. Every company is different and I won’t assume that your company works just like mine. I do think that performance tracking is valuable and necessary, but figuring out how is completely up to you.

Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 9:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.