How to Track Goals for Employees by Using KPIs

Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is a basic part of any long-term business plan. By using KPIs, businesses can track their progress towards various goals. However, goal tracking isn’t limited to just the business as a whole—KPIs can be used to help employee goals as well.

Wondering how to use key performance indicators to track employee goals and objectives? Here are a few tips for how to track goals and objectives for your team members:

How to track goals: Choosing goal-oriented KPIs

Before you can start using KPIs to track employee goals, it’s important to pick some relevant employee performance metrics. Not just any random KPI will prove useful for tracking employee progress towards goals.

When choosing KPIs for employee goal tracking, consider the following:

1. Is the goal quantifiable? Employee performance metrics need to be easy to measure and quantify. Something like “be more positive,” while sounding good, is hard to quantify and measure objectively. Instead, consider setting goals based on KPIs that can be objectively measured with ease.
   
   
2. Is the goal relevant to my business’ objectives? When picking KPIs, it’s important to make sure they align with your overall business objectives. For example, if your current business objective is to improve customer satisfaction, then KPIs such as time-to-resolution or ticket close rate could be valuable. On the other hand, if your current goal is to drive revenue, then KPIs such as upsells, total sales, or average deal value could be valuable.
   
   
3. Can employees have a realistic impact on the KPI being measured? How much control can an employee realistically have over the KPI you want to track? For example, if you were thinking about tracking time-to-resolution for customer issues, the value of that KPI would not be very high if every ticket had to be routed through several other systems and people. On the other hand, if most tickets could be closed by a single person without relying on outside authorization, then time-to-resolution would be extremely valuable as an employee performance metric.
   
   
4. Is the KPI relevant to the employee’s role? Obviously, not every employee should be graded on the same metrics—you wouldn’t hold your tech support team to the same metrics as your sales team and vice versa. When choosing KPIs for individual team members, it’s important to tweak the selection to match that employee’s role.

Some examples of KPIs that we use to track our own team members include:

• Dials-per-week for sales team members (to measure outreach efforts)
• Tickets escalated per week for support team members (with the goal being one or fewer escalations)
• Blog articles (like this one) published per month
• Qualified inbound leads (as a company-wide goal)
• Demos scheduled (to help close more deals)

Many of the employee goals you track can be personalized to individual team members. For example, instead of having a blanket “every sales team member has to make X calls this week” goal, you could set a personalized goal for one person to make 15% more calls than they have previously. Meanwhile, another sales team member could be tasked with getting more demos scheduled each quarter.

Why set personalized goals for employees? Because, it helps you address the specific strengths and weaknesses of your individual team members so they can be the best versions of themselves. This way, if one employee makes plenty of calls, but lags on getting demos, or vice versa, you can address the performance issue.

Of course, it’s also important to emphasize employee goals that help further the interests of your business. By experimenting with different goals and measuring their impact on your business’ bottom line, you can establish a few go-to employee performance metrics that can help your company.

How to track goals: Creating dashboards for employees and teams

Once you’ve selected some KPIs to use for tracking employee goals, it can help to create a dashboard view for each employee you want to track. This dashboard should provide you with a quick overview of each employee’s performance based on their progress towards your most important goals.

For example, say your most important goal for your business is to grow revenue. In that case, some of the employee performance metrics you’ll want to put front and center on the dashboard may include total sales, average deal value, and/or total number of customer outreach activities (phone calls, emails, texts, etc.).

Creating these dashboards makes it easier to track employee goals with a glance instead of having to dig through endless tables of employee KPIs.

On a related note, you can also create dashboards for entire teams to track group progress towards business goals.

How to track goals: Creating employee goal reports to track progress over time

The idea behind goal tracking is to measure progress over time. Creating quarterly or yearly reports can help with this.

By creating and archiving quarterly reports, you can track an employee’s progress towards their goals over time and see if their performance has improved, declined, or plateaued. If their performance is improving, you can ask them if they’re doing anything differently from before, or if their new success can be attributed to experience. If their performance is declining or has plateaued, it may help to check if anything has changed or if there are any new processes or issues that may be keeping them from succeeding.

Just because an employee has reached a plateau in their performance doesn’t mean that they’re a poor performer. Even your top employees may encounter a ceiling on their performance after a while on the job. Although, it may help to change things up for employees who have stagnating performance metrics so they have a new opportunity to grow.

Need help tracking employee goals?

If you need help tracking employee goals, reach out to the BrightGauge team today! We have a proprietary goal-setting system that allows team members to mark their progress on a daily basis, fostering a culture of accountability and productivity that can eventually lead to better business outcomes.