Are your customers telling you the whole truth?
When you own—and manage—a business, ensuring that you and your employees keep work standards high is no simple matter. This is especially true when your team is physically separated, which is common in the construction and home services industries.
Difficulties with slipping standards typically arise when managers don’t have the right tools to help them ensure that their teams maintain high standards. Some of these tools are fundamental best practices; others are third-party solutions that improve visibility.
If you want to make sure your team is performing up to your expectations, the suggestions below may help.
3 strategies for simple performance tracking
1. Take a step back
Managers, especially shift supervisors, often find themselves directly involved in activities other than managing their teams. This is to be expected and isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, it can create situations in which managers aren’t actually seeing their teams working.
Simply taking a step back from day-to-day administrative tasks and looking around creates an opportunity to see team performance firsthand. This can be in the form of literally watching team members work or checking in with them from time to time. In many cases, a combination of conversation and observation is the best solution.
Intentionally slowing down to give yourself an opportunity to monitor performance is the most basic step towards maintaining high standards. It is an extremely helpful technique and gets you in the mindset of performance tracking.
2. Review work completed
Another strategy is to ask each team member to briefly review his or her completed work with you. In the technology world, this technique is often used in a ritualized practice called a stand-up. However, this can be done more informally as well. Simply ask each person to tell you what he or she has accomplished since you last talked and what he or she plans to accomplish next.
Although this is a simple practice, it can be illuminating. Naturally, people who are working hard and delivering solid results will have clearer and more complete accounts of their work.
Using this method requires a little reading between the lines. Someone who hasn’t completed a lot of high-quality work may be working slowly for various reasons. He or she may be blocked by some obstacle, for example.
Learning to apply the right intervention for struggling team members takes practice. Nonetheless, this is a good way to monitor employee performance.
Consider extending this method by asking team members for a self-evaluation of their work from time to time. Most professionals want to perform well in their jobs. Give them a chance to tell you what they are proud of achieving. Similarly, ask them what challenges they faced.
Self-evaluation is both a good way to track performance and to encourage team members to want to maintain high standards.
3. Ask around
Don’t rely solely on yourself and your team to evaluate their work. After all, the opinions of your customers and other stakeholders are the ones that truly matter. If the people who pay you aren’t happy, you have a major issue on your hands.
Talk to customers about how a job is going and whether their needs are being satisfied. Ask about specific employees, the team, or the work as a whole.
You can apply this same technique to your vendors and other team members. Check in from time to time and ask how things are going. This is a great way to turn your stakeholders into your eyes and ears.
Supercharge your performance tracking
All of the above practices are very valuable and should be used by every manager and team leader. Nonetheless, they are limited and rely heavily on individual accounts and in-the-moment evaluations.
Furthermore, when you base a lot of your decision making on your opinions and those of your team members, you run the risk of skipping the most important opinions: those of your customers.
Develop and use a formalized process for capturing customer feedback. This is not only a good way to gather useful reviews and testimonials, but it also gives you valuable insight into your team’s performance.
One of the most important lessons in business is learning to see your offerings from the perspective of your customers. Consistently capturing their thoughts will help you better understand your customers’ perception of your business, your team’s performance, and how effectively you maintain high standards.
You don’t need to do this alone, fortunately. Check out the list below to learn how a third-party customer satisfaction surveying solution can help you gather information quickly and consistently:
- Ask for more than reviews. Customer satisfaction surveys do more than just gather reviews of your business. Customize your survey to ask specific questions that help you evaluate performance from your customers’ perspective. This is one of the best solutions for monitoring employee performance.
- Ensure good response rates. One of the greatest challenges in gathering customer feedback is getting people to respond. A third-party solution can help ensure each customer gets the right survey at the right time and in a manner that is easy to complete.
- Track analytics. If you simply read reviews, chances are high that you’ll focus on particularly negative or positive comments. Taking a more data-driven approach will help you get a clearer picture. For example, a dip in your company’s Likely to Recommend score indicates that it’s time to evaluate your company’s processes.
- Share reviews. While your primary concern may be to monitor employee performance, you can also share reviews with prospective customers. This is a great way to more effectively promote your business.
Get started with GuildQuality
Put your performance tracking efforts into high gear using GuildQuality. Our customer satisfaction tracking solution will help you gather the online reviews you need to stay competitive as well as give you vital team performance metrics. When you have the data you need, maintaining the high standards you value isn’t difficult at all.