Back in the 1920s and 1930s, interest in using a scientific approach to organizing labor and controlling workers arose. In the 1950s and 1980s, schemes and methods for testing various categories of employees aimed at identifying the performance indicators of their work began to appear. From the beginning of the 90s to the present day, the systematization of existing knowledge and the development of new methods that help companies effectively evaluate personnel is taking place. Students receive primary knowledge about these techniques while studying at the university, so today we will look at the specifics of how to compile a staff performance report.
What Is a Staff Performance Report? – Look at the Writing Sample!
The staff performance report is the type of business memo that serves as the basic tool of communication between the management and the quality assurance departments. It attempts at the determination of the personnel’s attainments and drawbacks at the definite stage of the development. As a result, the final aim of this document is the realization of the problematic spots on the employees’ overall performance that should be improved further and, correspondingly, the design of the strategies to proceed with the amelioration task. The staff performance sample below provides the variant of how such feedback may look like in the professional setting.
Dear Quality Assurance Department,
This is the annual staff performance report that evaluates our company’s achievement for the 2016 year and marks the directions for further progress.
- Work product. In comparison with 2015, the quantity of the signed insurance contracts with the judicial and private persons has raised for 6 percent. Meanwhile, the quality of the legal procedure has significantly augmented, what is supported by the reduced time indices spent on the duration of the business appointment, the well-set mechanism of the preparation of the documents, and the ultimate conclusion of a contract. This entails that both managers and workers have demonstrated a high level of accuracy and productivity during the previous season.
- The ability to meet the defined deadlines confirms the staff’s involvement in their direct work responsibilities with the less time devoted to the out-of-the-work activities. This confirms the efficacy of the policy to restrict the workers’ access to social networks (except for the breaks hours). At the same time, among 50 members of the company, 4 employees are repeatedly noticed to violate the discipline by going late for work whereas 8 workers do it on an irregular basis. As a result, this calls for the need to define the fixed fine ($5 and $10) to be imposed on both categories of the wrongdoers correspondingly.
- The recent survey conducted by the HR Department reveals that 67 percent of workers find the work microclimate close to their demands and expectations whereas 26 percent consider it quite satisfactory and 7 percent – suppressive. Though the part of the discontent employers is rather low, the implementation of the team-building activities seems quite appropriate to reestablish the balance among the staff members and unite them together.
- According to the latest polling findings conducted among the managers, the workers manifest the average adjustment to the new alterations in the daily operation. For this aim, it is required to modify the way the employees are informed about the new changes: the written communication should be preserved for the slightest policy renewals while the oral channel should prevail for the major innovations, which should be discussed with the staff more personally.
- Service to clients. The statistics gathered on our official website as well as the feedback from the social networks give the ground to conclude that the level of the customers’ satisfaction with the judicial aid provided has increased by 11 percent, what elicits pride for our common efforts. Simultaneously, this aspect requires further elaboration in the form of the clients’ inquiry.
We are waiting for your unanimous decision on the strategies for the improvement of the staff performance and hope to get the first draft of the next plan in a week.
Who Needs to Write a Staff Performance Report? – Not Only Students!
Thinking now, “I will ever be free from writing all these reports”? Report writing skills are always essential in any professional career if you certainly want to vault to the top. So it is better to start developing these skills now and stop struggling with the task to write a report in the near future. By the time when you finish reading this article, you’ll say, “I can write my staff performance report” enthusiastically. Moreover, it will help you get a competitive advantage not only among students but also among other office workers.
It is considered to be that reports of any kind are needed only by managers to trace where the flows of working time and finance of a company are sent. This is partly true because with the help of this report the manager gets:
- The real picture of what is happening in a company/department and how it is done in fact (and not in words or on paper).
- The awareness of many potential problems that have not yet arisen but may soon become relevant;
- The evidence of the transparency and effectiveness of each employee (how many and what tasks he/she manages during a working day);
- The opportunity to analyze specific tasks to identify and correct inefficient ways to accomplish them.
On the other hand, employees also get all these opportunities that can be used by them for self-development and optimization of their tasks. Writing a staff performance report is a great way to assess your own skills and qualities, consider your aims in life and set new goals to develop your own potential for better results. Besides, follow 10 tips for personal self-development applied by a bestselling author, Matt Morris.
Very Important Info! The Opposite Opinion!
If you still continue to take a stand, “I can’t write my staff performance report”, there is a good argument from a professional. For example, Liz Ryan, the creator, and head of Human Workplace consulting company, is convinced that regular employee performance evaluation is an expensive and useless practice. She listed 10 reasons to abandon this practice, which are published on Forbes. You can stand by argument, but you’re highly recommended to slice and dice all the necessary details.
3 Main Staff Performance Report Goals
If you’re unaware of why you need to write a staff performance report, here are three main goals of staff performance reporting:
- To determine the ratio between the cost of maintaining an employee and the amount of work actually performed by him/her.
- To assess the potential of existing employees – make sure if there is a possibility of nominating some of them to senior positions without the cost of finding and training new employees;
- To identify the functional role of an individual employee — whether he/she is only a team player or if certain conditions are created, can manifest himself/herself as a bright personality.
5 Staff Performance Evaluation Criteria
In most companies, the education, qualifications, and experience of an employee are not as important for the head of the organization as a specific result. Therefore, the main criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of work is the performance of the staff. The remaining indicators – personal data, qualifications, experience – are counted as an auxiliary, and not the primary criterion.
Assessing the performance of staff, the following parameters are taken into account:
- The amount of work performed;
- The complexity of the tasks;
- Features of the assigned functional duties;
- Timeframes of completing tasks;
- Labor results.
However, the most vulnerable point of employee performance reports is vague criteria for evaluating results. In practice, this is further aggravated. At the moment, there is no single mechanism to objectively evaluate the work of an individual employee or the entire staff of a company. This is due to the diversity of methods for calculating performance, the specifics of the functioning of individual enterprises, the features of the distribution of professional duties assigned to staff, as well as the “portraits” of the ideal employee in a particular organization.
10 Main Elements of a Staff Performance Report
- Full name and position of the employee.
- The structural division where the employee works.
- The description of the completed task. It should be clear what work was done.
- Achieved results. If the result is not achieved, then the information on how and when this problem is planned to be solved. The ways how to avoid it in the future should be next to the information on the occurrence and reaction to the problem/task that has arisen. It is also necessary to indicate which regulatory procedures require additions or changes so that this problem no longer occurs. It is necessary to immediately put the corresponding tasks in the plan. New tasks should contain a link to the current as a source.
- The time spent on the task. For each completed task, it is necessary to indicate the time spent on its execution. If the employee has a feeling that the total time spent on the task may cause some questions, it is necessary to immediately explain “why so much time was spent”.
- The name and position of the person who is the customer of the work (or the name of the organization of the customer);
- The name of the person to whom the result of the work was transferred;
- The names of those with whom the employee interacted in the performance of work;
- A statement of whether the work performed is consistent with the approved plan;
- The date of the report, as well as the period for which the report was compiled.
Put Simply, …
The simplified version of the report is appropriate in cases when the organization or a specific structural unit has a system for the submission of daily reports by employees. In a simplified version, the report mainly contains the following elements:
- The name and position of the employee;
- The structural division where the worker works;
- The description of the work done (planned and unplanned);
- The date of the report, as well as the period for which the report was compiled.
Remember the Main Principle of Successful Report Writing
Let’s be honest! Not everyone gets the same high from writing reports. Why does it happen? Most people are not enough trained or experienced to write reports. You don’t write a staff performance report every day, do you? Even if you had written loads of different reports before, you may get confused about the writing style, the content to include, the language to use, the length of the paper and other details. Luckily, all these details related to staff performance report writing are given to you and you can deal with this type of writing less stressfully for yourself.
However, if you lack some free time, you can go on feeling stress. Right? In this case, there is one more effective way to deal with any type of report writing – apply to our experts who know more about writing than you think. Solve any problem with us!