Employee Performance Management Process: Best Practices

According to a recent Gallup study, only 33% of Americans are engaged at work. 

This alarming number is even lower for hourly workers, who are 10% less engaged than salaried employees. 

With millions of Americans quitting their jobs, increasing engagement levels should be on every organization’s agenda, especially if you have hourly or frontline employees. 

An effective performance management process can motivate your employees to maintain strong performance, decrease turnover rate, and improve your bottom line. 

But when it comes to hourly and frontline workers, building a successful performance management process can be challenging. 

These types of workers rarely have fixed work hours and often switch their stations, making it difficult to monitor employee performance and productively communicate on a regular basis.

Secchi is an hourly performance management software that streamlines the process of supervising your hourly employees and gives frontline leaders the clarity they need to make data-driven decisions. 

Book a demo to learn what Secchi can do for your organization. 

How to Track Employee Performance for Better Engagement and Productivity of Your Hourly Teams

What Is Performance Management? 

Performance management is a collaborative process between management and employees to track & review performance, exchange feedback, and encourage positive improvements across the workspace. 

Traditionally, performance management has consisted of regular but infrequent check-ins between HR professionals and the workforce, such as annual or bi-annual reviews. 

However, the traditional approach has proven to be confusing and ineffective, especially with hourly and frontline employees. 

90% of HR leaders agree that annual performance reviews don’t bring desired outcomes because there’s little room for an open dialogue, too many gaps to fill, and potential for bias. 

Performance management is evolving into a more streamlined, collaborative, and, most importantly, continuous process for enhanced connections, accurate performance trends, and uninterrupted improvement. 

Why Is Performance Management Important for Hourly Workers? 

Hourly and frontline workers are more prone to feeling undervalued and less important than full-time employees because it’s harder for HR leaders to effectively engage with them and accurately track performance. 

A lack of a productive performance management process for hourly workers can have serious consequences, such as low morale, absenteeism, and failure to achieve strategic goals. 

Moreover, a recent study showed that over 58% of hourly employees wanted to leave their positions because of lack of recognition and rewards. 

So, how do you create a performance management process that goes beyond tracking the basics (ex: number of hours worked) and gives you functional data to actually engage, analyze, and improve your workforce? 

The challenge with hourly employees is that traditional tools and incentives that apply to salaried employees (such as goal-setting) don’t translate well into the hourly work environment. 

To increase personal productivity and team results, it’s crucial to implement a performance management system that is specifically designed for hourly employees and frontline workforce, such as Secchi. 

Employee Performance Management Cycle: Crucial Steps

Effective performance management is a continuous process that allows leaders to monitor, analyze, improve, and reward employees. The key phases of the process can be broken down into the following steps. 

Monitoring 

In this phase, managers monitor worker performance to hold your hourly teams accountable. 

Key variables to track here are more than just discipline-related metrics like attendance & work hours, engagement, and productivity. 

There are manual or semi-automated monitoring tools that you can use, but Secchi allows you track your team performance in real time and generate instant performance reviews. 

Analyzing

Once you gather performance data, you need to analyze it to identify high and low performers, take necessary corrective action, and uncover potential deeper issues within your standard operating procedures or policies. 

These steps allow you to proactively problem-solve and help your employees work better. 

Secchi reduces time from incident to corrective action by greater than 50%, while improving the documentation and consistency of the actions taken. 

Improving 

It’s important to bring visibility to behavior patterns and identify any gaps, trends, or repeated mistakes. This step helps you understand how you can improve your workspace performance and in which areas your hourly workforce may need additional coaching or support. 

Continuously giving your hourly workers opportunities to improve their skills and grow at their role doesn’t only improve workspace performance, but also increases retention rates. 

One of the reasons why hourly workers look for new career opportunities is because they feel “stuck” at their current job. Offering them professional development opportunities, such as coaching or mentoring programs, can result in higher engagement. 

Rewarding

Employee recognition is key to better performance and higher engagement levels. 

63% of employees who are recognized won’t look for another job and 79% of millennials say that rewards would make them loyal to their employer. 

Plus, recognizing your employees can increase their productivity levels by 11%, which is all the more reason to use your performance data to reward top talent. 

Employee Performance Management Cycle: Best Practices

Throughout the performance management process, it’s important to utilize practices that encourage engagement, give opportunities for feedback, and help you grow a stronger & more collaborative team. 

Create a Culture of Open Communication

Effective communication helps you resolve issues and negative sentiments faster and easier for better workspace culture and relationships. 

Transparent communication is also key to increasing worker productivity because it allows managers and HR leaders to set clear objectives and expectations. 

Connecting with hourly and frontline employees is a challenge, but Secchi makes it easy to connect with your employees in real time. 

Encourage Feedback 

Your hourly employees want to feel that they have a voice. 

While it’s important for HR leaders and managers to be able to regularly deliver constructive feedback to employees, it’s equally as important to give your hourly workforce regular opportunities to share their feedback and adjust your processes accordingly. 

Make Data-Driven Decisions 

Workspace decisions should be made with data, not emotion or confrontation. 

One of the reasons traditional annual performance reviews don’t work is because they leave a lot of space for subjective judgment and bias. 

Secchi gives supervisors and HR managers the clarity to make data-driven performance decisions, which creates a more productive work environment, improves engagement levels, and reduces resentment. 

Secchi: Performance Management Software to Remove Barriers & Streamline Your Process 

Secchi is built for hourly and frontline leaders to effectively engage, connect, review, and improve worker performance on a continuous basis for better productivity and stronger teams. 

With Secchi, you can simplify and automate manual processes in just a few clicks with an easy-to-use interface. 

Book a demo today to learn what Secchi can do for your employee performance management process.