Top 5 Employee Performance Metrics for Hourly Teams

Performance management can transform the productivity of your organization. Effectively tracking employee performance gives you the much-needed insight into your team members’ engagement levels and encourages positive improvements across the workplace. 

Yet, measuring employee performance on a regular basis is nothing short of challenging, especially in the fast-paced environment of the frontline. People are more complex than data, and the fact that 95% of managers are dissatisfied with annual performance reviews shows that there’s a pressing need for better performance management solutions. 

Continuously tracking employee performance metrics is key, but which metrics are the most important to pay attention to? In this article, we’re going to unpack what performance metrics are, why they matter, and which ones you need to start tracking, STAT. 

What Are Employee Performance Metrics? 

Performance metrics are values that help supervisors & leaders measure the output and health of their teams. They provide insight into work trends, show how your employee’s work compares with your organization’s goals, and help identify areas that need improvement. 

Some performance metrics are quantifiable. Things like attendance, number of sales, and units produced can be expressed in hard numbers. Quantifiable employee performance metrics are typically the ones that get tracked most often. 

However, many employee performance metrics are unquantifiable. It makes them more challenging to track, but they’re no less important than metrics that produce quantifiable results. Things like teamwork, learning ability, and customer satisfaction can be difficult to accurately measure, yet they have a big impact on your organization as a whole. 

Why Do Employee Performance Metrics Matter? 

Comprehensive employee performance data serves multiple purposes when leading an hourly team. It helps supervisors and leaders: 

→ Determine if employees are hitting their performance targets. At the very basic level, tracking employee performance metrics shows you whether individual employees are achieving the goals you set for them. This gives you an insight into the health of your organization. 

→ Set performance expectations. If your employees know that their performance is being tracked, they know that their supervisor/organization has a certain expectation for their discipline & quality of work. A strong performance management process can improve productivity, engagement, and turnover rates. 

→ Visualize performance trends. Once you gather enough performance data, you’ll be able to identify bigger trends happening across your workplace and reduce repeated mistakes for more productive day-to-day operations. 

→ Identify coaching opportunities. If you see that performance targets are repeatedly not being met by your employees, it can indicate that you need to provide additional training programs to help them improve their skill set. 

→ Provide better employee recognition. Meaningful employee recognition is key to better engagement and turnover rates. Measuring performance helps you identify and reward top performers. 

The most important benefit to tracking employee performance metrics on a regular basis is that it gives supervisors & leaders the clarity they need to make data-driven decisions. 

At the frontline, supervisors are often faced with tough choices. Having objective & comprehensive performance data at their fingertips allows them to make fair decisions without emotion or confrontation. 

→ Tracking employee performance metrics is easier with Secchi, a robust performance management software designed for hourly teams. 

Top 5 Employee Performance Metrics for Hourly and Frontline Teams

So, which employee performance metrics do you need to track to set your hourly team up for success? Here are the top five metrics to help you effectively evaluate employee performance. 

1. Discipline and Presence

It’s important to ensure that your hourly or frontline employees show up for their shifts on time and stick to discipline expectations. Chronic absenteeism or tardiness results in a lack of motivation, low productivity levels, and disjoined team culture. 

Occasional missed shifts due to sickness or emergencies are normal and can happen from time to time. Yet, if you notice that your team members are regularly missing shifts, clocking in late & clocking out early, or taking long breaks, it’s something that you need to address as soon as possible. 

Enforcing discipline is important, but tracking this employee performance metric can also help you uncover deeper issues at play. Burnout, dissatisfaction with work responsibilities, or a poor relationship with a team member or a supervisor are all possible causes of chronic absenteeism and tardiness. 

2. Productivity

In the fast-paced environment of the frontline & hourly work, efficiency is important. If your employees are wasting time and not meeting their targets, it’s something that you need to know about as soon as possible. 

Tracking productivity is not always straightforward. In contrast with attendance & discipline, it’s not an obviously quantifiable metric to measure. To track employee productivity, you should measure work output over a certain period of time (ex: hour, month). For example, you can track how many tasks your workers have completed per hour. 

Keep in mind that being efficient doesn’t always mean that your workers are delivering high-quality work. Productivity ≠ good work, which brings us to the next point. 

3. Quality of Work

You want your employees to be productive, but it’s also important to ensure that they’re not sacrificing the quality of their work for the sake of completing a task as fast as possible. Poor work quality results in substandard products or services, which hurts the health of your organization. If your workers’ productivity is high but the quality of their work is low, you need to adjust your expectations. 

One of the best ways to improve your employees’ quality of work is to provide effective feedback. Yet, with 81% of frontline leaders unsatisfied with their own performance, the ability to provide effective feedback is a skill that your supervisors may need help cultivating, along with these five key leadership qualities. 

4. Professional Development

Your hourly employees should grow in their roles & competencies, and their learning progress is an important employee performance metric to track. It can speak to the health of your team, their engagement levels, and the relevance of your career advancement or training programs. 

Research shows that frontline employees are eager to learn, with over 70% of them applying for career advancement opportunities. To see if your professional development programs have the desired effect, you can track metrics like completion rates and quiz scores. 

5. Teamwork

It’s important for your employees to work well together, and teamwork is one of the key employee performance metrics to track. Good team culture can improve productivity & engagement levels and lower employee turnover, so getting insight into how your employees interact with each other and feel about their co-workers is crucial. 

Teamwork is not a quantifiable metric, but you can still integrate functional ways to track it into your operations. For example, you can use surveys (anonymous surveys can work really well for this) to have your employees provide feedback on teamwork on a regular basis. As you gather more and more data, you’ll be able to brainstorm better ways to foster team culture over time. 

Final Thoughts

Regularly tracking key employee performance metrics gives you a strong foundation for improvement as well as the clarity to make data-driven decisions about your workforce. Yet, effective performance management is nearly impossible without a functional tool in place. 

Secchi removes barriers and eliminates waste in the performance management process, allowing operations managers, HR professionals, and frontline leaders to efficiently track performance. Book a demo today to learn more about the impact Secchi can make on your organization.