Meet the Experts – Hanadi Sidawi, Product Manager, SimpleStrata

KPI reporting can clearly communicate the progress of a company towards its performance goals. Not only the managers can access key results in an instant and transparent manner, but also make informed strategic decisions. 

Here are the top benefits of investing in a great KPI reporting tool for your organisation and management.

1. They Let You Measure Results

Measuring is an important part of KPI reporting. It is the primary key that informs you about the success or failure of your work. You need to measure the progress made towards the achievement of your target: the number of sales increased (sales performing), the number of new customers or anything in your business you want to measure.

KPIs provide actionable information because they are always measurable and quantifiable. For example, if one of a hotel company's identified CSFs maintains a high level of occupancy throughout the year, a KPI would be the percentage of occupancy of rooms, measured on a weekly basis, using the previous year as a benchmark.

2. They Help You Set Business Goals 

You need to set a target and aim to reach it in a set period. You can set more than one targets and create different keys for each of your targets to ensure you measure your progress and then try to achieve your goals.

It's often difficult to keep all departments or teams within an organisation aligned and working toward common goals. Once an organisation's Mission, Vision and CSFs have been written into a strategic plan, KPIs break down complex information into understandable metrics and provide feedback on the organisation's progress. Communication of progress toward KPIs keeps everyone moving forward in the same direction.

You May Also Like: Guide to the Must-Have KPIs for Service Companies

3. They Offer Incentives to Your Team 

KPIs are often linked to incentives. Teams or individuals are offered an incentive to improve their KPIs to a particular level during a specific time period. In order for this to be successful, the KPIs have to be clearly understood and quantifiable, and reporting must be accurate. The information provided by KPIs empowers people to improve their own personal performance along with that of the organisation.

4. They Help Your Find Issues in Your Business Strategy

Managers can use KPI to identify any issues present in the construction of business. Any type of problems such as labor productivity issues, danger to employee safety and failures to meet the expectations and needs of customers. KPI enables businesses to recognise these issues to take appropriate action to rectify these problems. Companies can also resolve customer’s issues and concerns with the help of KPI by analysing feedbacks from clients to check whether the expectations of clients are met or not. This approach also helps in eradicating future potential issues that may occur in the future projects.

4. They Let Your Discover Strengths in Your Strategy

With the KPIs, companies can easily unearth potential strengths to use any opportunities that you can use to enhance the performance of your business. Businesses can easily find the strengths whenever a post-project review shows a high score and this score indicates your performance in your performance. Companies can follow the same procedure to upgrade the performance of their company if your post-project review shows high score.

5. They Align Your Marketing & Sales Efforts

With help of KPIs, companies can easily measure and calculate all efforts that also includes marketing spend and sales department so that all departments can work in a harmonised way. When goals are decided by companies, team members start work in collaboration. This approach brings two departments closer for better insight.

6. They Save Business Expenses

With KPIs, you can easily recognise any cost saving prospects related to the project construction and also craft ways to curb any extra costs that may occur in future. KPI basically include tracking of uncommitted costs and also upsurges committed costs as and when required. Business can easily add factors like contingent costs and price escalation into the committed costs to restrict financial exposure. The knowledge that is gained from the audit can assist companies to manage all labor and material costs when they do bidding for construction in the future.

Are you considering getting your own KPI dashboard?

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SimpleStrata provides a complete solution which enables organisations to communicate and execute their strategy in an effective way, by helping them:

Manage Results
Set goals, objectives, and KPIs
Generate periodic measures
Distribute to employees
Schedule review meetings
Generate results’ scores

Manage efforts
Plan initiatives, projects, jobs
Link to strategy plans
Schedule and assign activities
Monitor progress
Generate efforts’ scores

Create visibility
Define correlations between results and efforts
Generate business intelligence dashboards
Provide insights about corrective actions

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When speaking of per­for­mance man­age­ment, many think of the annu­al per­for­mance review process. But the annual per­for­mance review or appraisal is only a small com­po­nent of employee per­for­mance man­age­ment. 

Employee performance management goes much further than the traditional annual review. It involves regular purposeful interaction between management and employees that is focused on job performance as well as direction and support for the employees.

According to Gallup, organisations that successfully engage their customers and their employees, experience a 240% boost in performance-related business outcomes compared to an organisation without engaged employees or engaged customers.

What is employee per­for­mance man­age­ment?

Performance management defines your interaction with an employee at every step of the way in between these major life cycle occurrences.

According to the definition pro­vid­ed by Michael Arm­strong in his Hand­book of Per­for­mance Man­age­ment,

​“Per­for­mance man­age­ment is the con­tin­u­ous process of improv­ing per­for­mance by set­ting indi­vid­ual and team goals which are aligned to the strate­gic goals of the organ­i­sa­tion, plan­ning per­for­mance to achieve the goals, review­ing and assess­ing progress, and devel­op­ing the knowl­edge, skills and abil­i­ties of peo­ple.”

Note how he mentions that per­for­mance man­age­ment is a con­tin­u­ous process — not an annual event. 

A per­for­mance man­age­r should, there­fore, bring togeth­er dif­fer­ent, inte­grat­ed activ­i­ties to form an ongo­ing​”per­for­mance man­age­ment cycle”. Ideal performance management should make every interaction opportunity with an employee into a learning opportunity.

We have put together some tips for optimising your employee performance management system.

1. Identify the goals of your performance management initiatives

As you develop a performance management program, you need to understand what you want to accomplish from it. Ask the following questions to define your goals: 

• Do you want to increase productivity?
• Does your organisation want to identify potential leaders and develop them?
• Do you want to optimise the incentives process?
• Are you seeking to improve employee retention or engagement?

If you know what you want your program to do, it will be easier to build it to accomplish that goal.

Related: FREE guide! Learn everything you need to know about creating the ultimate Digital Employee Experience .

2. Align goals with a performance plan

Now that you have set your goals, develop a performance plan to go alongside. Develop short term goals. As long term goals can overwhelm the employees even before they start.

3. Monitor progress towards performance plan

Review employee performance regularly. Use metrics and analytics to track how goals are progressing. This will keep the process transparent and allow you to support your employees, whenever necessary.

4. Offer actionable feedback

During the feedback sessions, tensions can arise if the feedback is not constructive and actionable. It is not very helpful for employee morale to blame and point fingers. Instead performance manager should guide employees towards future success. 

Managers should make sure to keep feedback professional and remember to focus on behaviour, rather than characteristics.

5. Take advantage of multiple-source feedback

Ask employees to provide feedback for each other. This will give the performance manager a more holistic view of employee performance. It will also help them understand the challenges that teams are facing, and be able to better offer feedback.

Related: How to Manage Results vs. Efforts and the Communications Gap - FREE Ebook!

6. Provide frequent training to your employees

Regular coaching can help identify and solve problems before they get out of hand. Monthly or quarterly meetings should be held to help keep employees on the right track. It also helps to organise cross-functional coaching sessions. This helps employees - and managers - understand what other departments do and operate.

7. Accept that employees’ are not always the source of problems

It is easy to assume for the management that problems are always caused by employees, but that simply is not the case. Problems can come from various external factors such as availability of supplies, internal processes that are causing issues, or organisational policies. Seek out the other source of problems as precisely as you can in order to fix them.

8. Acknowledge and reward employee achievements 

You cannot expect employees to stay motivated if their achievements are never rewarded. Yet, many organisations overlook this key element. Make sure that employees are not only compensated but also recognised for their hard work. You can rest in peace that they will continue performing for your organisation.

9. Foster a performance-oriented culture in your team

Make sure that your organisation has shared values and cultural alignment. A sense of shared goals, beliefs and expectations among employees creates a pleasant workplace. And a harmonious workplace is good for productivity, positivity and eventually better performances. 

In conclusion...

We can all agree that performance management has a significant benefits for employees and managers, as well as for the company as a whole.

For any Human Resources department, performance management is an important system for onboarding, developing and retaining employees, as well as reviewing their performance. 

If you are a performance manager or human resource manager it may seem overwhelming to keep up with the entire process. But there are tools to make your life easier at work. 

Simple Strata can help you align your entire employee performance management strategy. 

Learn More about SimpleStrata

The growth and ultimate success of any company is determined by the consistency of results. These results can only be achieved if the team consistently meets the desired goals and targets. KPIs are the means of setting and measuring the success of these goals. In this post we will briefly take a look at what exactly KPIs are and why an organisation needs them. 

What Is a KPI?

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable values that show the effectiveness of a company’s business objectives. A company will set High-Level KPIs that measure the overall performance of the business towards achieving its strategy. Low-Level KPIs measure the performance of departments, units and individuals.

KPIs Are Different From Goals

Although the terms “KPI” and “goal” are often used interchangeably, they are not really the same. A company’s goals define the outcomes that it desires to achieve, in a form of measurable results. KPIs, on the other hand, are indicators on the performance that tell whether the company is on track to achieve those goals.

So, why should you have KPIs for your organisation? Here are the top 6 reasons:

1. Transparency around performance 

Without knowing what the goals of the organisation are, there is no way to gauge a team or individual performance. Therefore, no ability to guide the team to improve or optimise. With clearly defined KPIs it is easier to give accountability to the specific team members and achieve transparency. Teams can collaborate better when they know exactly where to focus their energy.

2. Accountability within the team

Numbers do not lie! It is easy to answer the status update related questions when KPIS are clear as day. Performance analysis and making personal decisions is all easier. Work is not measured by irrelevant benchmarks such as hours at work or number of emails sent per day. KPIs let team members take responsibility of their time on the job and making sure that they align efforts with goals. 

3. They help with decision-making

This is logical. When you implement KPIs, you will automatically need to develop systems/processes to measure them. With this information, the business intelligence gained will allow management to make more informed decisions. 

4. You Can Measure Your Targets

Though they may be easily confused, KPI’s are not exactly an organisation's goals themselves, but they’re a measurement of them. 

A KPI can indicate that your sales team is only generating 30% of the targeted number of leads that you have set as a goal. As a manager in this situation, you are instantly aware of your sales team’s progress and the reason for not hitting the desired numbers of leads.

When you’re able to measure your goals this way, it gives you the opportunity to see where the gaps in your efforts might be and subsequently make decisions that help you reach your goals faster.

5. To analyse patterns over time. 

If you measure the same KPIs quarter over quarter, you can begin to detect patterns in your numbers. These patterns can help you optimise your business strategies.

This can allow you to make predictions about the slow or high performing quarters. Or identify over or under performing team members and help them improve their efforts. 

6. You’ll get an integrated overview

One of the main reasons to invest in a KPI software is integration. The data flow from different sources can be a big complication if no integration methods are applied.

Using a KPI software allows all your departments to enter their data manually into one big system, or the program can connect to different data flows automatically. Whichever method is used, you can be sure that the integrated connection will boost your business management.

Now that you know why KPIs are significant for your business, here is a handy guide to help you in defining KPIs for your organisation. 

Download this FREE guide and start setting the KPIs that are relevant to your business. 

Download Here

This ebook will provide you with sample KPIs for the most common positions at service companies, with guidelines for setting smart KPIs.

Download Here