No manager will nowadays deny the importance of evaluating employee performance, and traditionally it is a significant part of annual or quarterly reports. Making such a major sum up is, undeniably, a good practice, yet not very effective. Having analyzed the performance results for such a lengthy period, all you as a manager can do is to scold or praise, give a raise, fine or fire, correct task allocation, set another priorities or restructure the team, but all these are future measures. The performance of the reporting period is gone and its results can never be improved or altered.
The situation can be completely different if instead of annual reports the company adopted tracking performance on a permanent basis. We suggest you to start from the basics: establishing KPIs and choosing a performance tracking system. KPIs obviously vary from company to company and from position to position, but there are the acknowledged 5 elementary metrics necessary to keep track of:
- presence
- leadership, or taking initiative
- commitment (hours spent at work)
- quality of work
- professional development
How to interpret the metrics, what variable to choose and whom to apply them is totally up to you – this is where we cease giving advice. Yet how to track – in this aspect our expertise is rather wide. Having worked with Atlassian tools for over a decade, our consulting team knows the best solutions for every work process, and performance tracking is among them.
Here’s what Atlassian ecosystem can offer to a manager:
1. Tempo Budgets by Tempo for JIRA
As you could have guessed from the plugin name, its main purpose is fiscal management, yet it is packed with goodness and offers many valuable for project manager features. Among them are the functionalities for staff allocation, capacity and workload management as well as Earned Value Management (EVM). This tool allows you to track the performance on the daily basis and get the long- or short-term view over the project. At the same time, it might be not the best solution for intangible indexes such as leadership or quality of work. All in all, its complex functionality will be the substitute for a whole pack of tools.
2. ProForma: Forms & Custom Fields for Jira by ThinkTilt
This tool allows to create custom fields and forms and add it to JIRA ticket, opening vast possibilities to the performance evaluation. As a manager, create a ticket template and ask your team members any type of questions (open, multiple choice), receive and process the data and export form responses to the report spreadsheet. ProForma is the best solution for measuring developers performance and a great form of feedback.
3. eazyBI for Jira Cloud by eazyBI
Having gathered all the necessary data with the help of, let’s say, ProForma plugin, don’t you get tempted to make judgements from the look on it. The information needs to be analyzed properly, and there’s no better solution for it than eazyBI plugin. This is a powerful reporting tool with vast possibilities like:
- charts and graphs of all kind
- numerous analysis patterns
- custom fields (Sprint, Epic, and Story Points) and Jira Service Desk custom fields (with SLA metrics) support
- CSV or Excel files, SQL and REST API data export
Needless to say, that as every Atlassian tool, this one is Agile-oriented. What is more, eazyBI vendor is an Atlassian top vendor who guarantees at least 8 hours a day 5 days a week support of its plugin.
4. Notion for Jira by Notion
This isn’t a very demanded plugin, which is strange, because it’s functionality is everything a team manager could wish and nothing extra. The plugin allows to get a management insight into performance metrics of teams by tracking, visualizing and sharing the gathered data. Besides from the expected analytical functionality, this tool offers anonymous team polls that help to capture valuable team performance data. All in all, the plugin received only 5 stars and enthusiastic reviews, so it’s worth trying it out.
In sum
Implementing the system of performance evaluation is undoubtedly a tricky thing to do that will demand meticulousness and constant commitment. Therefore, it’s a good idea to have a team meeting beforehand and explain the benefits for employees that such a monitoring system can bring. Emphasise the fact that these measures are not introduced out of suspiciousness and mistrust, to spy on the team and watch every step they take, but to properly evaluate their performance and allocate the bonuses and promote the genuinely worthy ones. As for the constant commitment – the aforementioned tools will be able automate half of managers efforts, so the devil is not as black as it’s painted.
