How to Know if You Have the Right Team

Employees have three options: exceed, meet or fail to reach expectations. If you’re not careful, such strict conditions can breed a culture of negativity and fear within your company.

It is necessary to maintain a human element if you switch your company to metrics. Even though metrics aim to remove subjectivity from the evaluation process, they can turn evaluations into tough, sometimes disheartening conversations. Managers must find a way to lighten up the workplace.

Sometimes it’s as easy as playing a simple game. Quarterly goals are highlighted in elaborate display cases within each department. A payout is assigned to each metric. If workers meet or exceed those numbers, the entire company gets a bonus—and every employee gets the same bonus. If the company meets the top end of its goals each quarter, each employee can earn a designated dollar sum in bonuses annually.

With the bonus game in place, you do not have to tie the results of job performance evaluations to an employee’s salary. Your company can plan parties and events at the end of each quarter to celebrate successes and get revved up for the next quarter. Before metrics, when you were not looking at numbers regularly, these successes (and failures) might have gone unnoticed, and issues would not be addressed as promptly.

The numbers serve as a tool for promoting ethical and equal treatment of employees. No high-performance team functions without respect for its members and confidence in its ability to succeed, both within the group and from managers. In an increasingly competitive job market, giving employees the tools to see unequivocally how they’re faring in their positions just might be the right thing to do.