Employee development is an investment in your employees’ skills and abilities but is a metric that can be difficult to measure. Many businesses avoid consistent training and development because they don’t see its value when employee turnover is high. However, the newer generations in the workplace view development as a benefit, and top talent will ignore businesses that don’t offer it.
Training and development programs are great for retention and keep employees engaged, inspired, and loyal, but it’s hard to determine the ROI. Today I am going to discuss five easy metrics to measure your investment in employee development.
Quality of Work
We all know that quality is better than quantity–and it’s even more critical when you consider employee productivity. An employee who gets along with coworkers and meets deadlines but doesn’t produce quality work is costing the company money and needs to be retrained or terminated. Attitude and coworker relationships are aspects of individual performance, but if an employee produces low quality, that affects your bottom line.
Depending on the industry and the employee’s specific duties and tasks, the metric to gauge is the percentage of rejected work or work that needs to be redone. If it’s data entry, software code, or written work, the metric would be the number of input errors, corrections, or bugs. A single mistake in computer programming can stop an entire program from working, causing a significant impact on your business.
Attendance
Highly motivated employees generally take fewer sick days. Whereas employees with high absent rates tend to be less productive and a key indicator of lower performance. If there is excessive absenteeism, you can’t ignore this kind of behavior without a compelling reason. Your other employees will get stuck picking up the slack for the missing employee or performing tasks they usually wouldn’t have to do.
When employees are absent, it could cause their team to miss a deadline, earning your company a reputation for not delivering a product or service on time. Absenteeism is a big deal for businesses when you consider lost productivity, morale, or temporary labor costs. Using attendance as a metric will help you identify the employees who need correction and showcase the people you want to groom for advancement.
Training programs
Invest in your employees, and they’ll invest in you–is how the saying goes. Training programs are essential to help employees grow professionally and reach peak performance. However, development opportunities can be costly, and many managers argue a low return on investment. Training and development programs designed with creativity and relevance keep the employees excited to learn, grow, and increases performance.
The metric to measure when it comes to training and development programs is participation. Which employees are attending, and which ones are opting to receive a digital presentation or recorded version of the training? Dedication to training reflects the employee’s commitment to growth and promotion. The second metric is to determine if the employees are applying what they learned to their work. If managers don’t follow up with individual employees after training, the employee will be more likely to see it as worthless and a waste of time and money for the company.
Attitude
Employees with positive attitudes feel connected, committed, and invested in the company’s success and are more productive than negative employees. A lousy attitude, coupled with a lack of concern for the well-being of the company, is costly to a small business. Employees need to have a helpful attitude while assisting customers or helping coworkers achieve the company’s goals. An employee with a negative attitude often focuses solely on what they have to accomplish to get by.
Not looking out for coworkers is inconsiderate and makes the other employees work harder, and lowers the team morale. Ask these questions when evaluating the metric for an employee’s attitude: Are they helpful to customers and coworkers? Do they have an optimistic opinion of the company and management? Do they solve problems or complain?
Performance Evaluation
Performance evaluations help employees understand what is expected of them. In most companies, performance is assessed several times a year when employees are evaluated on the quality of their work and their actions and behaviors while achieving the company’s objectives. During an evaluation, the manager informs the employee of the required changes or improvements they need to make in the future. Measuring how the employee utilizes the information is a vital metric to help gauge their development as well as how the manager and organization are supporting them toward meeting their goals.
In conclusion, a company is only as good as the talent behind it. Consistent and accurate evaluations of employee performance are essential not only to the individual but also to your businesses’ success. Keeping the metric system consistent, documented, and easy will give you all the data and instruction you need to keep your team growing, productive, and engaged.