Good employees have a range of different strengths -- that's what makes them good. But what specific traits should you focus on when drafting employee performance reviews?
In order to find out, we asked 10 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question.
Q. What is one metric you use across all departments to measure employee effectiveness when administering performance reviews? Why?
Their best answers are below:
1. The Come-Back Sauce
When an angry customer almost stormed out of a BBQ restaurant, the manager jumped in, listened and gave the person a free bottle of sauce for his trouble. You can bet that customer came back! My request for the team in every interaction is to "find the come-back sauce." If you can't help someone right then, at least give them a reason to call you when you can.
- Grant Gordon, Solomon Consulting Group
2. Values and Professionalism
Values and professionalism are too often left out of reviews despite being critically important to employee performance. Documenting employees who don't properly represent company values (even if those employees are hitting their numbers) would serve employers well. Doing so is an opportunity to realign behavior and provide legal protection in the event that things don't work out.
3. CWRR Application
We have a simple metric that we publish every week to everyone in the company -- cumulative weekly recurring revenue. It's the percentage of monthly recurring increases we've accrued. Everyone's job connects to that core metric. If it goes down or up, we track to see where those changes came from and congratulate or constructively criticize the appropriate division, department and employees.
4. Helpfulness
It is part of a performance review, but it is driven by the crowds in my business. We ask: "Who in your department (or another department) has been the most helpful over the past six months to you and your operational role?" It is a great motivator, is totally anonymous and identifies the real doers in the company -- not just what management believes. - Joshua Konowe, Konowe.com
5. Initiative
As a "growing up" startup, we place a lot of value on initiative. We need our employees to be proactive in their projects and tasks and make the effort to find solutions to challenges they encounter. By helping the company grow in this way, they are also helping themselves grow into effective, accountable leaders and problem solvers.
- Fabian Kaempfer, Chocomize
6. Tardiness
I own a home care business. So, it is important that we are where we are supposed to be when we are supposed to be there -- from my nurses to the administrative office. I track tardiness across the board as a key metric.
- Alex Chamberlain, EZFingerPrints
7. Contribution to Revenue
The only number every employee can be held accountable for, directly or indirectly, is revenue. We reward our sales, accounts and marketing teams for revenue-generating activity, and we reward other teams for company-wide revenue performance. The bonus calculation itself is specific to the department.
- Ryan Buckley, Scripted, Inc.
8. The Values Metric
As a values-based organization, we have a core set of non-negotiable things we commit to collectively. It is important to us as an organization to recruit to these values, manage performance to them and breathe life into them in the day-to-day. Doing so helps employees understand how those values are operationalized in terms of tangible behavior and results. - Chris Cancialosi, GothamCulture
9. Understanding of Our Industry
We rank people's understanding of our industry. The ad tech space is stunningly complex, and we think it's important for our employees to know what's going on "out there."
10. Risk
Were the employees unafraid to take risks during the period of time or did they only stick inside their comfort zone? We are a big advocate of trying new ideas in our creative processes -- measured and calculated, of course -- and really encourage our team to step outside of their comfort zones to try new things.
