How do you measure the performance and success of your remote staff? Remote team members can be extremely useful, and remote work often boosts efficiency by reducing distractions and saving time. However, many managers are still seeking the best way to determine exactly how productive their remote team members are. Fortunately, you can easily track work performance by using performance objectives and KPIs.
Set Clear Performance Objectives for Remote Teams
The first step is to establish clear and quantifiable performance goals for your remote teams. Each remote employee should be able to understand their performance goals and how to reach them. The best way to achieve this is to use the SMART goal-setting standard.
SMART goals are:
- Specific: Clearly defined action, quota, or metric
- Measurable: Can be measured and quantified with data
- Achievable: Can be accomplished under current conditions
- Relevant: Directly relates to the employee’s tasks and business objectives
- Timely: Has a time limit, scope, or scheduled regularity
Select Performance Objectives and KPIs to Measure Remote Employee Success
The next step is to identify the performance objectives and KPIs you will use to measure remote employee performance and success. Key performance indicators or KPIs are the standard way to set and track the fulfillment of business goals. You can also apply them to a campaign, project, strategy, or employee to track the key elements that define success.
The following are KPIs that often work well to track the performance of remote employees and remote teams.
- Task Completion: How many tasks your remote team can complete within a measured amount of time
- On-Time Deadlines: Whether deadlines and milestones are reached on time, or the percentage of on-time vs late deadlines.
- Time Per Task: How long specific measurable and repeated tasks take to complete. TPT can shorten with experience until a practical minimum.
- Work Quality: The measurable quality of work produced by the remote worker or team.
- Response Time: How long it takes for a remote employee to respond to or fulfill requests.
- Customer Satisfaction: If in direct contact with customers, customer satisfaction rating can serve as a remote worker KPI.
- Precision Percentage: If performing work that requires accuracy, the percentage of accurate precision can be measured.
- Profit Generation: If in a position to generate profit, total profit generation can be a KPI.
- Improvement Rate: The rate at which an employee improves their KPIs with or without feedback, training, and guidance.
Establish Benchmarks for General, Personal, and Team Accomplishment
Once you have performance objectives and KPIs to measure, take these measurements for a few weeks to establish a “benchmark” or average performance without intervention. You can then set goal benchmarks—milestones of progress that you want remote employees or teams to achieve after receiving feedback and encouragement.
Consider measuring and setting benchmarks for general performance expectations, personal performance improvement, and shared team accomplishment. This will also give you a detailed view of remote staff performance on a broad and refined scale.
Inform and Motivate Your Remote Team to Meet KPI Goals
Once you have set goals, begun measuring performance objectives and KPIs, and established benchmarks, it’s time to involve the team. Introduce KPIs as a system that remote employees can ‘win’ by measurably improving their stats. Many professionals are much more motivated when they know that their work will be recognized and that any extra effort they put in will show.
Publish benchmarks and performance goals and challenge your remote teams to meet those goals in a supportive and encouraging way. You can also benefit by giving individuals access to their own KPI scores without making them public. Professionals often feel empowered to beat their high scores, even if competition with other employees is not an element you want to introduce.
Reward Employees Who Produce Positive Results
Performance objectives and KPIs can help you quickly identify the top performers on your remote staff. And you know what to do for top performers: Recognize and reward. Congratulate, spotlight, and encourage employees who work faster, harder, with greater precision, produce the best quality, or impress the most customers – depending on their role. You can also offer structured incentives and rewards for top performance. This will help your hard workers feel recognized and valued while motivating others to achieve the same heights.
Celebrate Teams With the Best KPI Efficiency
Do the same for teams that achieve great KPIs through collaboration. Hold virtual events and send care package perks to remote team members who have delivered an excellent project, beat all their deadlines, or are otherwise knocking it out of the park. After the celebration, you can also hold larger meetings where remote teams can compare strategies and help each other plan to beat their next round of performance goals.
Plan for Growth and Professional Development
Performance objectives and KPIs are not just a way to measure performance and ensure your remote teams are being efficient. They also often lead to motivated improvements in work speed, quality, precision, and other performance elements. When your entire remote staff is eager to exceed the next performance metric, business growth naturally follows. As you plan to expand, don’t forget to provide professional development opportunities to your high-performing employees and teams showing their passion for self-improvement and professional excellence. This is a powerful way to keep your best talent and cultivate more valuable credentialed employees on your team.
Empower Remote Success Through KPI Implementation
When seeking the best way to manage your remote staff, begin with your objectives. Establish reasonable and measurable objectives and the KPIs you can use to track remote team performance toward reaching each goal. Performance objectives and KPIs can also help empower employees, measure and boost remote efficiency, and forge professional growth paths.
BrightR specializes in helping companies build remote teams with access to international talent. If you are looking to include Canadian professionals in your growing remote staff or hone your remote team management strategy, we can help. Contact us today to learn more.
