A modern project team will often contain team members with a range of different skills and competencies. This can naturally lead to problems for project managers who want to perform a balanced performance assessment that will judge every team member fairly. Knowing how to assess performance isn’t very easy when all the important metrics come in unequal units.
If you are managing a multi-disciplinary team and are looking for ways to improve your performance assessment across the different competencies involved here are some ways to do it.
How to Assess Performance of Different Skills
Work efficiency
For every different field of expertise there are metrics that define one’s capability. For example, a copywriter might be expected to write an average of 500 words an hour or a mortgage advisor might be expected to have 20 meetings in a day. To find the standard work efficiency of a particular job you can measure production over a certain period (i.e. a week, month or quarter), talk to others in the field or ask the employee themselves. This baseline productivity can then be used to measure how an individual employee is performing based on previous efforts or the industry average.
Achieving set objectives
Another means of performance assessment for various employees is to collaborate with them and other relevant stakeholders to set objectives for them to achieve. How they perform in relation to these doesn’t necessarily have to be as binary as success or failure. With OKR’s for example, an achievement of 70% of one’s objectives would be considered as successful.
Attitude assessment
One thing that remains common across all team members is their enthusiasm for the work that they are doing and how committed they are to the project at hand. Through the observation of behaviour while at work and how employees react to various situations they are put in or tasks requested of them, a PM can judge how motivated they are to perform at their highest level and work towards improving.
Measure client satisfaction
While each team members skills may differ, your clients’ satisfaction with their work should be easier to rate on a scale. Ask them either formally or informally how they found their experience with a relevant team member and this can then be used as a universal metric for performance assessment.
180-degree feedback
This is a simpler version of the well-known 360-degree feedback. It provides for a more direct portrait of the employee in question as it focuses only on the team members they work with as well as any managers or team leads. It is useful for assessing employees who work more towards the back-end of processes and as such don’t have much, if any, customer contact or reports. Their competency at their role can then be addressed by those who know them, and their field of operations, best.
For any size of a team, having transparency about what and how they are doing is vital for achieving effective performance assessments. Planview AdaptiveWork offers industry-leading clarity on tasks and resource usage, so why not try it for yourself and see.
