Personal KPI Examples: Measure Personal Performance

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), also known as ‘key success indicators’, fundamentally help businesses and staff meet goals.

KPIs are not complicated to understand. At their core is the notion that every organization has a set of metrics it can utilize in order to judge the performance of either a part or the whole of the operation. Peter Drucker’s understated, yet critical, observation makes the point abundantly clear: “What gets measured gets improved.”

The measure may be something as simple as you, or your business unit, achieving a set goal or target. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, it could be achieving a set of business objectives over a period of time. This might be through something tangible such as meeting productivity targets, or in meeting a metric, such as reaching a certain stock market valuation.

What all of these have in common is an effective measurement of goals and objectives, be it how well customer service is delivered, wider business performance metrics, or longer-term strategic organizational goals. Deciding which KPIs are right relies on clearly defining critical success factors first, and only then pinpointing KPIs that actually matter.

Employee KPIs often feed into wider operational KPIs, so that staff are working towards a goal that will ultimately help the business meet its wider objectives. Let’s look at five of these, specific to personal performance:

1. Customer Satisfaction

Let’s be blunt - unhappy customers do not make for good long-term prospects for any business. Customer support and satisfaction matter whether a company serves the general public or a paying customer. In a sea of KPIs, this is one that almost every company will want to be using. By tracking customer satisfaction, employees and companies can quickly understand where there may be problems within the organization.

For example, follow-up questionnaires that measure how customers feel they and their query were handled by a customer service representative -- or how effectively they feel a salesperson handled their inquiry -- are good ways of measuring the personal performance side of customer satisfaction.

2. Employee Satisfaction

If customer satisfaction comes as close as any KPI can to an imperative measure, employee satisfaction is a close second. Just as happy customers are integral to the longevity of a business, poor staff morale or engagement could spell disaster. It’s why KPIs need to be able to illuminate external as well as internal indicators affecting business. With employees, those internal KPIs can range from quantitative measures such as productivity to qualitative factors such as motivation or satisfaction.

3. Teamwork

There are a number of teamwork metrics that can form the basis of trackable indicators of performance over time. These may focus on attendance, helpfulness, efficiency, initiative, or quality. Arguably, group effectiveness will have a significant impact on the business as teamwork impinges on both customer and employee satisfaction if groups are not operating effectively. These all factor into how a team member is performing overall.

Take efficiency as an example. How effectively is a team member getting the task done? Tracking teamwork will prove a valuable KPI for recognizing problems within the workforce before they become a threat to wider company objectives.

4. Employee Turnover Rate

Personal performance could become academic to the wider business strategy if the company’s best and brightest fail to remain as human capital. In a small organization losing a valuable staff member could have huge repercussions.

Equally, a large business with a big number of departures will suffer in terms of internal morale, consistent customer relations, and the overheads of additional hiring and training this necessitates. Understanding that staff churn is high then opens opportunities to apply personal KPIs which track employee metrics affecting staff retention such as remuneration, benefits, team cohesiveness, job satisfaction, and more.

5. Achieving Goals (Employee Performance)

Any well-managed company will give its employees a clear steer on what expectations it has for meeting personal goals or targets. It’s an inevitable corollary of being an employee that the company has hired you to achieve stuff in its employ. Thus any HR manager worth their salary should be tracking employee performance in meeting the objectives set when that person joined the team.

This illustrates just a few personal performance KPIs that form the basis of a much broader spectrum of indicators. Their application to different workplace scenarios will be guided by wider organizational objectives such as annual sales targets, costs of sales, or ARPU KPIs. But, from a personal perspective, KPIs let employees monitor their performance and be able to both reflect and act upon their individual performance.

This means employees are more likely to achieve personal targets and be more aware of how to do so in the future.

What makes a good KPI?

When it comes to the question of what exactly it is that makes good KPIs, then there are a number of general traits and characteristics that help ensure the proposed indicators will be effective. KPIs should be:

• Relevant
• Clearly defined
• Easy to understand and use
• Comparable
• Verifiable
• Actionable
• Cost-effective
• Attributable
• Responsive
• Aligned
• Allow innovation
• Statistically valid
• Timely
• Measurable
  

What is a KPI for an employee?

• Innovation - Employees often want to offer their own personal solutions and strategies in relation to important company matters. Not only does such input make employees more engaged in their roles but organizations will certainly benefit from the wealth of ideas being proposed by the workforce.
• Make money for the company - Employees feel a greater sense of self-worth in the workplace when they believe they are of benefit and that their role within an organization has an important part to play in its success.
• Satisfy customers - Employees who receive positive feedback from customers will be motivated to continue to work hard and to go above and beyond. It can be easy to measure customer satisfaction levels through surveys that allow customers to call out star performers or rate employees.
• Better themselves - Workers are much more likely to remain in a position or part of a company that offers them room for continued growth and development. Organizations should offer useful and relevant ways for employees to improve their skills and career.

What is KPI for a team leader?

• Training hours or dollars invested in the team - An important duty of leaders and managers within an organization is to ensure their employees are equipped with the skills and knowledge they need to perform their duties effectively, and to also offer training that can help workers fill new roles as the business continues to grow.
• Team retention - When an employee leaves an organization, it can take a year or two for them to find and hire an equally productive worker. This is why retaining top talent should be a key priority to leaders and why effort needs to be towards making employees happy.
• Employee satisfaction or pulse surveys - With staff pulse surveys, leaders can regularly check in with their staff to address issues or concerns they may have before it's too late. These surveys can be done quickly and they offer management invaluable feedback.
• eNPS - Employer Net Promoter Score is a special system designed with the purpose of helping leadership determine their employees’ levels of satisfaction and loyalty to their company. This makes it easy for team leaders to understand how their workers are feeling and what, if anything, is detracting from the employee experience.
• 1:1s Completed with Team Members - A 1-1 is an organized conversation between a manager and their employee. They are a great way of indicating to managers and those who report to them any pressing issues, along with developing a strong relationship with workers that allows them to ensure that employees feel like they’re working toward their goals.
• Team Health Index - This is a technique that allows team leaders insight into a wide range of topics that can have a material impact on employee happiness and satisfaction, and they can also be a part of the measurements and metrics that organizations choose to collect.

What is KPI in HR?

• Absence rate: For HR to calculate their organization’s absenteeism rate, they must simply take the number of unexcused absences in a given period of time, divide it by the total period, and multiply the result by 100.
• Benefits satisfaction: To cut down on employee churn, it’s imperative that businesses assess the benefits satisfaction rate of their employees on a regular basis by carrying out surveys and listening to what workers have to say.
• Employee productivity rate: The productivity rate of an employee is measured by the amount of output on a project versus the amount of time it takes. The rate can be compared to a standard rate of productivity of a group carrying out a similar workload.
• Employee satisfaction index: Employee satisfaction is measured via employee attitude and engagement surveys. Dissatisfaction is a common cause of employee turnover.
• Employee engagement index: EEI is a method of measuring employees’ engagement with their jobs or day-to-day work. High employee engagement leads to better customer service, lower turnover, and other positive outcomes.
• Quality of hire: The effectiveness of HR and their recruitment process can be determined by the percentage of new hires who are given a good rating by their managers and are considered a valuable asset to the company. By succeeding in making good hires, HR is playing its part in helping the business reach its strategic targets.
• Turnover rate: Turnover is a very common metric and also an important KPI, as high turnover can be costly.
  

Key Takeaway

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable values that determine how effectively an individual, team, or company is reaching its objectives. Every proposed KPI is only as effective as the motivation it sets into motion. Organizations must understand that it is vital to set KPIs that have an attainable, realistic, and valuable goal.

KPIs have a significant role to play in business success as they enable organizations to understand the performance and health of the company so that critical adjustments in the execution to achieve strategic goals can be made. Apart from allowing for the monitoring of company health, KPIs make it easy to measure progress over time, identify patterns over an extended period, and solve problems or recognize opportunities.