Assessing the effectiveness of personnel management

Are you looking to assess the effectiveness of your human resources potential and personnel management system within your enterprise, but unsure about how to proceed? Do you find yourself puzzled about the foundations, methodologies, and key metrics to use?

We will provide you with a comprehensive guide in today’s article, detailing precisely these aspects. Additionally, as a bonus, we will suggest an online program suitable for automating this process and optimizing cost-efficient efficiency evaluations.

The Essence of Personnel Management Effectiveness Assessment

What is the core of labor performance evaluation? Firstly, the assessment of personnel management effectiveness is an ongoing, clearly defined process aimed at establishing the costs and benefits of human resources. It involves aligning their outcomes with the results of labor activities of competing enterprises and considering the past performance of the reviewed firm.

Quality of work assessment enables judgment of individual employees’ performance, their project accomplishments, as well as the collective efforts of the entire team. When evaluating team performance, criteria such as the volume of work accomplished, the complexity level of assigned tasks, the specific functional and organizational responsibilities, and the achieved results are taken into account.

It’s worth noting that various stakeholders, including employers, top-level managers, and business owners, have an interest in evaluating and researching effectiveness. Different supervisors often assess their employees’ effectiveness differently in various companies: some utilize KPIs, others consider the number of closed deals, and some base their evaluations on subjective preferences. Nonetheless, every leader has their own method, evaluation policy, and approach.

Objectives of Performance Evaluation

The evaluation of managerial workforce effectiveness serves a purpose beyond its apparent need. It’s conducted by a company’s leadership to shed light on several crucial aspects:

1. Quality of Management System: This includes the system’s functionality, the organization of functional responsibilities among employees, and the effectiveness of distribution.
2. Project and Task Accomplishments: Assessing the quality and quantity of projects and tasks executed by individual team members.
3. Employee’s Value to the Business: Recognizing an employee’s contribution to the collective mission and their significance within the organization.
4. Work Volume Alignment with Compensation: Evaluating whether the volume of work completed justifies the compensation received by subordinates.
5. Effective Employee Motivation Methods: Identifying strategies that effectively motivate the company’s personnel.
6. Employee Prospects for the Organization: Assessing an employee’s relevance to the organization’s interests, the necessity of investing in their training and professional development.

In essence, employers seek to understand how their systematic investments in personnel, such as salaries, bonuses, training, and social benefits, align with the profit derived from each individual team member. It’s crucial to see that the invested resources continue to yield returns. This perspective is relevant both in the context of state-owned enterprises and private businesses.

Indicators of Employee Management Effectiveness

The primary indicators of any enterprise’s productivity include the quantity, quality, and efficiency of employees’ work. The latter component consists of worked hours, volume of work accomplished, number of served clients, manufactured products, or processed information, depending on the business sector (e.g., tourism, management, sales, etc.).

The required level of labor productivity is not a static figure. It depends on a series of factors, principles, and methods that are equally influenced by both the team member themselves and their immediate supervisor. Let’s delve a bit deeper into this topic.

Mutual Willingness to Work

A regular employee will never exert the necessary and directed effort if they don’t understand the purpose of their exertion. Therefore, a manager seeking maximum effort from every subordinate should explicitly outline the potential rewards awaiting productive staff members. These rewards could encompass bonuses, social benefits, career advancement, status, and more.

With proper motivation in place, everyone benefits. The employee improves their financial standing and ascends socially or in their career. Simultaneously, the company reaps greater profits by utilizing each workforce unit effectively.

Utilizing Subordinates’ Personal Needs for Enhanced Efficiency

Beyond status and finances, each employee has personal interests that led them to join a particular company and assume a specific role. Managers or HR heads need to understand their staff members’ personal motivations and problems to leverage them in the company’s favor.

Management’s Investment in the Team

Feeling significant within the team is as essential a motivation factor for personnel as personal interests and financial gains. Every team member wants to feel indispensable to the company. When management is invested in their performance, appreciates their efforts, and respects their work, employees tend to be more responsible, ensuring they do not disappoint or fail the organization.

Challenges of Implementing an Evaluation System

Not every company possesses a successful employee evaluation system. Various reasons contribute to this, including poorly chosen methods, ambiguous functions during formation, immature technology, ineffective management, and insufficient measures.

Let’s explore the main challenges encountered when striving for an ideal implementation of an evaluation system for assessing the level of employee task execution efficiency:

1. Resistance from the Workforce: Employees may resist new procedures and changes, fearing increased responsibilities coupled with decreased compensation.
2. Complex or Multi-level Evaluation System: A confusing or multi-tiered evaluation system can confuse the workforce, leading to demotivation and negative attitudes toward their roles and tasks.
3. Unclear Compensation System: If the compensation system is unclear, employees lose their bearings and are uncertain about what to pursue to improve their financial standing.
4. Significant Disparities in Evaluation: Discrepancies in evaluating completed tasks and overall performance between team members and their supervisors can arise.
5. Goal Achievement Not Dependent on Employee Performance: There might be situations where an employee’s efforts don’t directly correlate with the achievement of goals.
6. Excessive Time Spent on Mechanical or Meaningless Tasks: For instance, having to write numerous reports could divert time from meaningful work.

In general, the key problem in implementing evaluation often lies in excessive subjectivity among management, lack of transparency, or unfair assessment methods, along with the lack of recognition for employees who genuinely deserve appreciation.

Work Quality Evaluation Methods

As previously noted, the primary criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of collective task execution encompass the organization’s ultimate profit and the motivation, activity, and willingness of employees to work within the organization.

However, any competent manager must realize that even the highest profit does not guarantee that no unproductive personnel exist within the team, masking themselves behind more efficient colleagues. Thus, in addition to tracking the company’s profitability, it’s recommended to conduct individual check-ups on each subordinate to determine their personal contributions, potential, external factors, and internal motivations.

The professional level of staff is determined through analysis of two criteria: the theoretical knowledge of company employees and their ability to apply this knowledge practically.

Specific employee evaluation can be conducted using various methods, but the most popular are certification, testing, target management, and performance management. These methods can be applied individually or collectively, as either one-time or periodic evaluations. Let’s examine each approach more closely.

Certification

For this method, a special committee is often formed, consisting of judges with expertise, knowledge, and skills from different fields. This committee assesses the level of professionalism of not just one, but several specialists within the company.

Evaluation is based on criteria such as the theoretical knowledge of the team, their ability to apply this knowledge in practical company activities, alignment of team members with their positions, professions, and specialties.

Testing

Tests offer the advantages of speed, ease of selection and administration, and reliable results. Test programs are often used during candidate selection processes and for the intermediate assessment of permanent staff.

Target Management

This method involves the objective evaluation of an employee’s social efficiency and analysis of their work during their service, as well as whether their role aligns with their occupied position.

Managers set several tasks for the staff, assigning precise deadlines for their completion: a day, a week, or a month of intensive work. Tasks must be clear, specific, and achievable. Employee opinions about strategic and tactical aspects of work are considered, and numeric and economic criteria of the plan are coordinated.

Performance Management

This evaluation technique examines the work of human resources from different departments of the company, entails setting tasks, and monitoring their effective completion by team members. Performance management essentially enhances the methodology of performance appraisal and competency assessment. Each employee is interested in promptly achieving the goals set by management.

The advantages of this technique include stimulating staff to enhance their professional level, improving work efficiency, and providing an objective evaluation of how well an individual corresponds to their role.

Within the framework of performance management, the following key stages are identified:

1. Preparatory Stage: Involves developing and refining criteria for assessing task execution effectiveness (commonly known as abbreviated as KRI).
2. Organizational Stage: Encompasses assigning challenging tasks to the staff based on prepared KRI indicators, along with possible training.
3. Assessment Stage: Involves critically analyzing staff work after KRI completion.
4. Final Stage: Consists of competency analysis based on obtained results and discussions about further development plans.

In addition to the aforementioned methods, other techniques such as role-play, observation, and biography assessment are widely used. However, evaluating personnel effectiveness is most conveniently done using specialized modern online services with numerous parameters and subsystems, considerably reducing the manager’s workload.

LiderTask — service for evaluating the effectiveness of personnel management

Effective Personnel Management System: Introduction to the LeaderTask Platform

An effective personnel management system is crucial for a well-conducted evaluation within a company, the future productivity of employees, and the overall profitability of the company. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to make the right choice when selecting a service that facilitates the assessment of personnel management effectiveness.

One of the best automated programs available on the domestic market for evaluating employee performance is the LeaderTask platform—an electronic assistant and manager designed for executives, individual company employees, and the team as a whole. Let’s take a closer look at this service.

This online application not only facilitates communication with personnel, delegation of tasks to individual team members, and project management but also enables the evaluation of completed work, work in progress, and tasks untouched by subordinates.

The program meticulously tracks the professional activities of each team member, maintains detailed statistics on employee work within the system, and provides clear and comprehensive analytics on performance. It showcases the most engaged, productive, and lagging employees within the company, not only to the firm’s leadership but also to all company employees.

This visualization allows team members to monitor their own and others’ achievements. As a result, each employee strives for excellence, attempting to achieve the highest performance, complete more projects, and avoid being among the least productive.

Moreover, LeaderTask includes the following useful tools that can benefit company leaders:

• CRM system with client interaction capabilities
• Task management, checklists, projects, hierarchical structuring of elements with a spectrum of tasks and assignments
• Kanban boards for visualizing personal goals, projects, and business tasks
• Notifications, reminders, and questions
• Daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly planners
• Gathering requests from websites, advertisements, emails, and other business sources
• Multi-platform support
• Intelligent search
• Offline mode
• Attachment of files in various formats
• Individual and collaborative access, administrator mode
• Customizable settings

The platform is suitable for both large corporations with thousands of employees and small companies with a limited workforce. Each company independently chooses a plan based on the number of employees and the quantity of projects. Additionally, a fully free plan with all essential program functions is available for those wanting to acquaint themselves with the online service.

In summary, an overall evaluation of workforce efficiency is a crucial indicator of the overall productivity of a company. Without it, it is not possible to adequately analyze and assess a company’s performance, determine the importance and necessity of various employees and managers, or judge the inadequate performance of lazy and unqualified workers.

Every business leader should systematically evaluate employee management effectiveness. For simplicity and clarity, it’s recommended to use automated services, and one such service is LeaderTask.