How to Track Hourly Employee Performance

In 2019, U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimated that hourly employees made up 58.1% of all wage and salary workers. 

Hourly employees are the backbone of the country’s economy. Yet, tracking their productivity and engagement has always been nothing short of challenging. 

To build a strong team, it’s not enough to just track employee hours. 

To improve results and retention, you need to efficiently collect and analyze comprehensive data about employee engagement and performance. 

Secchi is a software that simplifies hourly team performance, removes the barriers of administrative tasks, mitigates risk, and increases productivity to positively impact your bottom line. Book a demo to learn what Secchi can do for your organization. 

How to Track Hourly Employee Performance for Improved Morale and Bottom Line

The Challenge with Hourly Workers 

HR professionals often prioritize motivating and engaging full-time salaried employees over hourly workers. As a result, hourly and part-time employees often feel neglected and “less than” salaried team members. 

Not paying enough attention to hourly workers leads to poor performance and low engagement — not to mention the adverse impact it has on company culture.

However, hourly employee performance tracking is not simply a question of priority. 

Tracking the performance of hourly and part-time workers is significantly more difficult for HR professionals because there are multiple factors at play. 

Hourly workers often work non-traditional hours in physically demanding roles, which makes it significantly harder to connect with them, collect accurate data about their performance, and provide feedback. 

Yet, hourly workers want to feel connected to and recognized by their workspace. A recent survey by Legion Technologies showed that 58.3% of part-time workers wanted to leave their positions because of a lack of recognition and rewards. 

This brings us to the next point. 

Employee Recognition: Key to Engaging Hourly Workers

Employee recognition is the act of acknowledging the impact your workers have on your team and organization. It raises morale, improves employee productivity, and allows you to reward your top-performing talent. 

Study after study has shown the positive impact regular employee recognition can have on a workspace. 

• 63% of employees who are recognized won’t look for another job
• A recognition program can increase employee productivity levels by an average of 11% 
• 79% of millennials said employee rewards would make them loyal to their employer 

The heart of the matter is that recognizing your hourly employees is critical to improved engagement across your organization. 

However, many of the strategies that HR departments use with full-time employees — such as goal-setting — are not relevant for hourly workers. Here are some ideas on what you can do instead. 

Give Your Hourly Employees More Stability 

Many hourly employees work unpredictable hours and their shifts can often change at the last minute. This makes it difficult for them to plan their life outside of work and coordinate responsibilities like childcare, which can lead to anger and frustration. 

While it may be impossible to give your hourly employees full agency over their schedules, you can make an effort to offer them greater predictability or provide them with a say in the scheduling process. 

Giving your part-time employees more predictability and control over their daily schedules is an essential change to the pace of their everyday life that is not going to go unnoticed. 

Offer Rewards

Another employee recognition idea for hourly workers is to implement a reward system. 

Immediate motivators, such as financial bonuses, are more important to hourly workers than the prospect of a potential raise at some point in the future. 

Creating an opportunity to earn more money doesn’t only show employees that you care about them and make them feel good, but also increases engagement and productivity levels. 

There’s also potential for peer-to-peer recognition or healthy competition, which have all been linked to improved engagement and better team culture. 

Show Gratitude 

Demonstrating your hourly employees that you value their time and effort can go a long way. 

Hourly workers often report feeling neglected and less important than salaried employees. 

Acknowledging their hard work and the importance of their role on the team creates a culture where every employee feels valued and needed. 

Which, in turn, leads to higher engagement. 

You can show gratitude verbally or reward your employees with small presents, such as gift cards. 

The bottom line is: hourly employee recognition is key to improved turnover and productivity rates. 

To know how to effectively recognize your workers, you have to go beyond surface-level employee time tracking. 

Secchi makes it easy to track performance from multiple angles, bring visibility to behavior patterns, and reward your top talent.  

Tracking Hourly Employee Performance: The First Step to Employee Recognition 

Comprehensive hourly employee performance tracking is not just about monitoring and enforcing discipline. 

It can also help you engage your team, reduce errors, identify opportunities for growth, and make informed decisions. All of this doesn’t only lead to a better work environment, but also results in an improved bottom line.  

(In fact, in one product case, a Secchi customer experienced a 15% productivity increase). 

Here are our top tips for tracking hourly employee performance, so you can make data-driven decisions that will benefit your organization in the long term. 

Focus on What’s Relevant  

If you are already tracking employee performance and using it to inform employee recognition, it’s important to remember that multiple strategies that work for salaried workers, such as SMART goals and OKRs, are not relevant for hourly workers. 

To effectively understand your part-time employees’ performance, you need a separate tracking system designed specifically for them. 

Secchi is built to simplify hourly performance management by removing barriers, eliminating waste, and helping HR professionals, operations managers, and front-line leaders make data-driven decisions. 

It empowers you to engage, connect, review, and improve your hourly workforce because it recognizes its unique differences from salaried employees. 

Use Visuals to Simplify Data

When you’re working on multiple projects with many different people involved, performance data can become difficult to read. 

With hourly workers especially, constantly changing shifts and communication challenges can make it almost impossible to organize and understand the information you’re collecting. 

Visuals, such as charts and graphs, make it significantly easier to discern data. 

Secchi offers a clean, easy-to-use interface that allows you to see things clearly, so you can make tough decisions with data, not emotion or confrontation. 

Pay Attention to Trends

Regularly tracking hourly employee performance doesn’t only help you identify and reward top talent. 

It also allows you to bring visibility to behavior patterns and see where you may need to provide more education or support to your workforce. 

Creating visibility to behavior patterns and trends reduces the probability of repeated mistakes, so you can continuously improve the performance of your teams. 

Secchi allows you to analyze long-term trends in your workforce’s performance to solve existing problems and proactively optimize internal processes for the future. 

If you want to efficiently track employee performance, it’s not enough to have a time-tracking software or a time tracking app. It’s important to go below the surface-level KPIs and have access to clear trends that allow you to make data-driven decisions. 

Secchi: A Better Way to Track Hourly Employee Performance

Secchi was built by HR veterans to simplify hourly performance management. 

Now, instead of cumbersome manual steps and inconsistent data that falls through the cracks, you can have streamlined software designed specifically for the hourly workforce. 

Book a demo today to learn how Secchi can transform your performance management system.