When multiple projects are underway and being overseen by various teams, it’s important to check in with employee performance and see how things are progressing.
You may be used to walking down the hall and peaking into offices or cubicles, but with many companies committing to a fully virtual or hybrid workforce, face-to-face methods of maintaining momentum and monitoring progress are no longer feasible.
Leaders and managers need to evolve with technology and find digital opportunities to track employee performance effectively and productively. There are several different approaches you can take to find the option that’s best for your organization.
What is an Employee Performance Tracker?
In essence, any performance tracker is used to measure the work efficiency of an employee’s key performance indicators (KPIs). As opposed to face-to-face check-ins or chats at the water cooler, using KPIs to track employee progress holds several distinct advantages.
KPIs are transparent metrics that keep your teams aligned, give you a realistic look at your employees’ overall wellbeing and productivity, and allow you to adjust over time while holding your teams accountable. Employee performance trackers also help you to locate and eliminate non-productive tasks and add value to your business.
Depending on your industry and company, some out-of-the-box programs may be able to handle your employee tracking needs. However, Microsoft provides a variety of tools for creating an employee performance tracker to support your company’s unique goals and requirements.
Employee Performance Tracker Using Dynamics 365
Microsoft already offers a human resource management platform through Dynamics 365 (D365). At its most basic, Dynamics 365 Human Resources provides managers with organizational management tools for attendance, leaves of absence, employee records, compensation, and benefits. Bringing all this information under one roof streamlines and reduces the possibility of data islands in your HR processes.
With the Power Extension, the Performance Management app provides a plethora of employee performance tracking options, from reviewing goals to guiding training and development. It provides templates for evaluation and target agreement that can be shared throughout your organization, always ensuring transparency.
Through the app, employees can maintain a performance journal through which they can reflect on their own activities and attach specific performance goals. The app then affords managers a way to provide feedback through KPIs and graphical analysis, offering differentiated weighting to their feedback.
The Performance Management app even handles the small details, like distributing interviews to managers and getting digital signatures from all involved with just a few clicks. If your company already uses D365, the Power Extension is a great solution.
Tracking Performance Using Power BI
Microsoft’s Power Business Intelligence (Power BI) is another strong contender for employee performance tracking. Power BI has a Ways of Working Tracker that employs Workplace Analytics data to follow and analyze changes in employee collaboration and find ways of working smarter and better.
As a manager, you can target opportunities to improve employee wellbeing, optimize meetings, and boost managerial effectiveness. The Ways of Working Tracker helps draw correlations and conclusions between the data and KPIs, even as your KPIs evolve over time. These tools also track employee performance by examining collaboration on team projects and in planned meetings.
When employee performance breaks down, this tool has an Example Interventions page that provides data-driven ideas about how you as a manager can affect positive changes in employee performance. In other words, the Ways of Working Tracker looks more closely at how you and your employees work to improve the company as a team, not just as individual data points.
Custom Employee Performance Tracker Using Power Apps
Microsoft provides all the tools you need to build a customized employee tracker through Power Apps, including countless templates upon which you can construct an app that serves your company’s needs.
When diving into building a customized app for your organization, it’s essential to first analyze what key features you need to include. For example, depending on the size of your company, you may want to track employee performance through departments, rather than by each individual.
Consider what KPIs you need to track, and what the best way to display that information would be. If you want to track sales numbers, decide if you want to analyze this based on the previous month’s performance, the current quarterly goal, or each individual employee’s growth towards that goal.
You may have other specific organizational needs, industry requirements, or privacy restrictions that require a certain level of customization. If designing and implementing a custom Power App seems out of reach, consider connecting with an expert Microsoft consultant.
Related Content: What is an Employee Experience Platform?
Final Thoughts
Tracking an employee’s performance isn’t about outing bad behavior or micromanaging every aspect of your team. Once you have built a team that you trust, having an efficient employee performance tracker can ensure you all meet your KPIs, and that employee productivity and flexibility doesn’t go unrecognized.
Find an employee tracker that works with your organization’s unique needs and restrictions. Take advantage of integrative technology to help bridge gaps across remote workers and their management. Keeping an eye on how your team members collaborate will allow you to stay on target with business-wide goals and address concerns at the root.
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