When your employees work remotely, tracking their performance is essential.

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Doing so can help enhance employee performance and achieve your organization’s strategic goals. Additionally, tracking allows you to keep tabs on employees’ growth and development. Such insight can help you address what parts of their job employees struggle with. As such, you become aware of what employees need to elevate their skills and capabilities. This makes performance tracking a crucial tool for internal business operations. 

Given the importance of performance tracking for remote teams, this article will look into ways of tracking remote employees’ performance and how these benefit your organization. Additionally, it’ll give you tips on implementing performance tracking.

Ways of Tracking Performance 

There are several tracking methods that you can use to assess employee performance. Some of these include: 

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1. Peer Appraisals

Members of remote teams tend to have valuable opinions about their co-workers’ performance. These opinions can provide crucial insights into employee performance. You can then use this information to improve workflows. 

To conduct peer appraisals, your employees can use sheets or databases. You can then track changes in these mediums over multiple periods. This allows you to visualize (un)favorable patterns in employees' working behavior. While peer appraisals may reveal biases due to their personal nature, they are still valuable in tracking remote teams’ performance.

2. Dashboards

You can also use standardized dashboards for tracking performance. Dashboards allow you to measure a variety of metrics –– some of which can be department-specific. For example, dashboards for accounting departments can reveal error rates for journal entries. Given dashboards' flexibility, they're essential for tracking remote teams’ performance across departments. 

3. Self-Monitoring Tools

Improving employees’ performance isn’t only down to organizations and relevant managers. You can also ask remote employees to engage in self-monitoring. They can do so by measuring their productivity and skills using checklists and activity logs. Such tools can equip employees with the autonomy to set and track their own goals. This can increase engagement and nurture a greater sense of task ownership, ultimately encouraging productivity.

Regardless of the method chosen, performance tracking shouldn't translate to micromanagement. You shouldn’t want (or have to) follow or record everything your employees do. 

Importance of Measuring Your Employees’ Performance 

There are many benefits you can derive from using performance tracking techniques. Some of these benefits involve: 

• Enhanced productivity and efficiency
• Better managed timelines
• Improved discipline tracking
• The ability to identify employees’ strengths and weaknesses remotely
• The ability to determine the best-suited skills and roles for each employee
• Enhanced employee morale
• Higher willingness to innovate and undertake lateral thinking
• A motivating workplace culture

How to Implement Remote Employee Performance Tracking

Regardless of the performance tracking method chosen, there are several ways you can ease the process. These methods include: 

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1. Establishing Measurable Goals

For successful remote teams, you should have clear priorities that highlight measurable goals. As you can’t improve what you don’t measure, measurable goals are key to boosting your remote teams’ performance. There are multiple goal-setting frameworks you can use to establish measurable goals. These include Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Objective & Key Result (OKRs), and SMART goals. 

KPIs refer to quantifiable measures such as Revenue Per Employee. They’re an easy way to compare remote teams’ performance on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. OKRs refer to monthly or quarterly goals that are prioritized across your organization. To assert your OKRs, you should delineate 3-5 high-order objectives. Each of these objectives should then cover 3-5 measurable key results. This ensures that your organization has a clear and quantifiable definition for success. Lastly, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Such goals can help your remote employees know what to prioritize when working. 

2. Carry Out Random Inspections

Random inspections can be very useful in enhancing productivity. They ensure that remote employees are mindful of their work on an ongoing basis. As such, they motivate employees to reduce their bad work habits. While random inspections may seem invasive, if they’re conducted fairly, they can create highly efficient remote teams. 

3. Source the Right Tracking Tools

There are many available tools you can use to track remote employees’ performance. Depending on your chosen performance metrics, you can narrow down possible tools. As such, researching the best tools for your performance tracking endeavors is essential. This ensures you implement the right performance tracking throughout your organization.

4. Create a Timely Feedback Channel

Providing feedback for employees is an integral part of improving their performance. To be effective, your feedback should be constructive, timely, insightful, and actionable. As such, a well-thought-out feedback system can increase employees’ self-awareness and productivity. 

5. Carry Out Surveys

A key part of your performance tracking system involves employees’ opinions. These tell you what employees think of their job and how well their self-perceived performance is. To get this information, you have to ask the right questions. These should cover employees' thoughts on their responsibilities and performance. You can do this by distributing a survey. 

Ongoing surveys give you real-time data on employees. This data can help you determine employees’ satisfaction. Additionally, they can give you an overarching idea about roadblocks they face. Tackling these can create a more enjoyable work environment. This increases remote teams’ performance and engagement levels. 

Conclusion 

Using performance tracking methods for remote teams can greatly improve employee performance. By setting up clear goals and the right tools, performance tracking can highlight areas for improvement and maintain a set vision for employees.