It is common for companies to have a regular annual evaluation system. As discussed in my other article, The Issue with Typical Performance Measurement, I firmly believe that a company should have a much more detailed evaluation matrix and system.

During my career, I have worked with many customers, especially software development companies, to form detailed evaluation systems. The performance measurement systems were not only very comprehensive but also can be implemented on a monthly basis.

The typical system had 4-5 main categories and under each there were multiple sub-categories. The beauty of these systems were that they were calculating the numbers real time and were being driven by the numbers added by the resources themselves rather than being dependent on some human evaluation. For example, resources were responsible for punching their Time-In/Time-Out and similarly resources had to add their actual effort done against their assigned tasks etc. 

These systems provide a comprehensive range of categories which a company can add or remove as per their targets. The selection and weightage of each category give the customer the control to configure the system in the manner they want the resources to work. The important areas can have more weightage while each category defines what they want their sources to focus on. The result was that the resources started focusing more not only on important tasks but even the low value tasks started to remain under the radar. That aspect helped the resources understand and give value to some activities, such as Conducting Interviews, which were previously considered and unnecessary or some additional work. 

These systems also provided real-time numbers so the organization can have resource-wise and/or team-wise scorecard for pre-defined time period (Weekly, Monthly) and can have a healthy competition by sharing top scorers. These systems also helped in highlighting the weak areas of resources so they can work on those and fine-tune them as per employer’s liking. Some Organizations even linked these systems to their annual appraisal systems to provide useful data and indicators.