Performance management technology: tracking outcomes without drifting into surveillance

How to track employee performance: deciding what is legitimately measurable

1. Write the standard before the metric. What good work looks like in this role, in a sentence a person could act on. If that sentence cannot be written, no metric will substitute for it and the tracking will measure the measurable instead.
2. Prefer outcomes you already count. Tickets resolved, deliveries made, calls handled to a quality standard. Data you already have is better than new instrumentation, because people already understand what it means.
3. Say what is not being collected. Telling people explicitly that keystrokes, screenshots and idle time are not captured does more for trust than any assurance about what is. If they are captured, that has to be said too.

What employee performance tracking can reasonably cover

Objectives and their progress, agreed deliverables, and role specific output measures that a person can influence. Those three are defensible, understandable and useful in a conversation, which is the test any measure should pass.

Trend matters more than level. A single month is noise in almost any role, and treating it as signal is how performance management acquires a reputation for arbitrariness that takes years to shake off.

Where tracking employee performance turns into surveillance

Activity metrics: keystrokes, application usage, screenshots, time at a screen. These measure presence and compliance rather than contribution, they are trivially gamed by anybody who chooses to, and in many jurisdictions their use without a clear justification and notice is a regulatory problem as well as a cultural one.

The practical consequence is usually worse than the legal one. Teams that learn they are measured on activity produce activity, and the work that is hard to see stops happening because nothing counts it.

A performance tracker for employees as evidence, not judgement

The useful role for a tracker is to hold what was agreed and what happened so that a conversation starts from facts. That is a modest claim and it is the one that holds up, because the judgement remains with a person who knows the context.

Products that offer a composite performance score compress exactly the context that makes a judgement fair. Where such a score exists, know how it is computed, or do not use it in any decision that affects somebody's job.

Common questions

Is employee monitoring software the same as performance tracking?

No, and the categories are sold together. Monitoring measures activity; performance tracking measures agreed outcomes. Buying one believing it is the other is a common and costly mistake.

Can we monitor remote workers' activity?

Where it is proportionate to a stated need and people are told, some monitoring is possible. Continuous activity capture is hard to justify and harder to live with.

What should we measure for roles with no obvious output?

Agreed objectives and the judgement of people who see the work. Inventing a proxy metric because one is needed for the system is worse than having none.

Should employees see their own tracking data?

Always. A measure somebody cannot see is a measure they cannot act on, and withholding it converts tracking into surveillance in everything but name.

Coverage by country

• Employer of record vendors covering Singapore
• Employer of record vendors covering Mexico
• Employer of record vendors covering Spain
• Employer of record vendors covering Colombia
• Employer of record vendors covering United Kingdom
• Employer of record vendors covering France
• Employer of record vendors covering Hungary
• Employer of record vendors covering New Zealand