Employee Performance
Elevate Employee Performance
right from their personal or shared device.
CREATE A REWARDING ENVIRONMENT
Gamify Your Workspace & Reward High Performers
Tracking Training and Employee Development
An efficient system of employee performance management software will enable management to easily tell how individual employees are progressing through their training. They will also be able to see which employees are the top performers and which are struggling and in need of remedial training. This is a valuable tool for employee retention, not only by recognizing the top-performing staff members, but also the lowest achievers, as these employees place an unwanted burden on your top performers.
Staff members who are struggling will get the help they need in time to make needed corrections before they become frustrated and leave or make costly or dangerous mistakes.
Another excellent application for this software is for new skills training for internal promotions. Staff can complete training for their new position during slow or lag times without cutting into their work day or neglecting their current position’s duties.
Gamified Training
There is no need for job training to be boring. In fact, learning is much more effective if the employee is more actively engaged with the training program. When training is more memorable and enjoyable, your employees are far more likely to pay attention and retain the information presented than simply being asked to watch an informative training video with no interactive component. Gamified training materials invite the trainee to interact and engage with them, and incorporate elements such as Scoring, which promotes friendly competition between co-workers and incorporates elements from video games.
Trainees earn points or level up by completing their training tasks and daily duties. High achievers are rewarded, encouraging and motivating all employees to do their best. As an added benefit, when employees feel that they will be recognized and appreciated for doing well, they tend to put in more effort and feel more satisfied with their job, which results in lower turnover rates.
EMPOWER YOUR STAFF
Employees Train Themselves
The Importance of Proper Employee Training
Proper training empowers your employees to make better-informed decisions throughout their work day. When they are well trained, team members carry an air of confidence that inspires trust in your customers. Employees who understand their work responsibilities and have the skills and knowledge to carry them out correctly tend to have higher levels of job satisfaction. And with higher levels of job satisfaction comes much higher rates of employee retention, and the financial rewards to your business of more productivity and less time hiring, onboarding, and getting new employees up to speed before they can begin to be contributing members of the team.
Few things in life are more stressful than being thrown into a situation where we don’t know what is expected of us, especially when we are being evaluated for the task at hand. Give your employees the tools they need to succeed and excel at their jobs, and it will be reflected in their performance.
Let the Staff Train Themselves
Management and more experienced employees have better things to do than spend most of their time training new staff. When new employees can take their training into their own hands, they tend to feel a greater sense of ownership and responsibility toward their job duties. Of course, managers and seasoned staff are available to answer questions and offer guidance when needed. But most of a new hire’s training can be done on their own through interactive videos and checklists with integrated training and software detailing their work responsibilities.
Jolt’s training software also includes quizzes covering important information to ensure that pertinent points are well understood as the employee advances through the training course. Your company can create custom training courses for each position and follow-up training for current employees as well. If you’ve been wanting to upgrade some of your systems or practices at work, but dread the confusion that might happen when you try to implement the changes, Jolt’s self-training tools are the solution you’ve been looking for.
Increase Staff Friendliness
Jolt scheduling ensures your employees aren’t overworked and locations aren’t understaffed for friendly service every day. Jolt even allows you to easily manage scheduling employees across multiple locations. Time off and availability requests are a breeze to manage, and improve both employee and management satisfaction.
Create Friendlier, More Competent Staff to Create a Better Customer Experience
If there is one thing that humans are better at than they think, it’s understanding others’ emotional states. Our brains are hard-wired to pick up on the subtle and not-so-subtle cues in people’s facial expressions and body language to ascertain their general mood. Evolutionarily, this has been a great way to avoid unpleasant encounters that could end in a club to the head. It also comes with many advantages in today’s world, but the upshot for customer-facing employees is that customers can often tell when they are stressed or unsure of themselves. In turn, the customers feel ill at ease and are left with a bad taste in their mouths about your establishment, whether they are consciously aware of this effect or not.
When your employees are happy, relaxed, and confident at work, it gives your customers a much better impression of your business, al them to enjoy themselves more easily.
Learn More
How to Evaluate Employee Performance?
Short of following employees around to monitor their performance all day, it can be difficult to get an accurate idea of how efficiently and effectively individual staff members get their work done. If employees know they are being evaluated, they are likely to do things differently than if there is no oversight.
The following suggestions are time-tested solutions that have been proven to give a fair assessment of employee performance. They have been developed by industrial-organizational psychologists, human resources experts, and other leading professionals in the field of employee productivity and satisfaction. These techniques are great for businesses of all sizes and work for employees in nearly any industry.
First, Set Standards
It is neither reasonable nor practical to hold employees accountable for completing specific tasks and behaving in certain ways if those tasks and behaviors are never clearly defined. In order for staff to meet or exceed your expectations, they need to have a firm understanding of exactly what those expectations are.
These standards should be put in writing and well understood by every employee. Do you want a dish to look a certain way when it comes out of the kitchen? Take a picture of a good example as a reference. Do you want your staff to follow a dress code? Clearly state which types of clothing are acceptable and which aren’t. Do you want the operating room to be clean and set up in a certain way? Make a checklist of specific tasks that need to be completed, and how often, and watch your operations improve automatically.
It’s not enough to give vague instructions like, “Employees should dress appropriately” and “The warehouse should be kept clean.” These do not contain any usable information and are wide open for interpretation – your ideas of what “professional dress” entails may be very different from someone else’s. For standards to be attainable, they need to specify workable steps, and employees need to be able to clearly visualize what it is that you want.
Set SMART Goals That Relate to Performance Standards
The SMART system of setting goals has been around since the 1980s and has become an extremely popular tool for creating goals in both personal and professional settings. It gives a useful framework for how to set goals for your staff that will help them to succeed. SMART is an acronym for the following words.
- Specific: Goals need to be specific, so you will be able to tell when you have achieved them. For example, “Tables should be cleared and re-set within 10 minutes of the customer’s departure” is more specific than “Re-set tables promptly when customers leave.”
- Measurable: Goals should have a number value attached to them so the progress can be seen. For example, “Sell three more drinks per night on average for the month of July” is a measurable goal, whereas “Sell more drinks” is difficult to measure. More than what?
- Ambitious: Don’t be afraid to think big! Setting ambitious goals gives employees something to work toward and results in greater feelings of accomplishment than setting the bar too low. On the other hand, you don’t want to set your employees up for failure. Some have suggested that the A in SMART might also stand for Attainable, to strike a balance between grand, lofty goals and goals that are easy to reach.
- Relevant: Make sure that employees understand the purpose of the goal–connect the dots in their heads. Seemingly arbitrary requirements will be more difficult to convince staff members to follow. When people see the connection between the goal and a desirable outcome, it makes more sense for them to be motivated to achieve that goal.
- Time Bound: Is there an end in sight? The most effective goals are set in conjunction with a time frame for reaching them. Jolt allows you to specify the exact timeframe for each element in a way that is clear for all to understand.
Measure Progress Over Time
Even the most diligent and conscientious employees can have a bad day now and again. That’s why taking assessments of your employees’ progress should be done with regular frequency, not just once in a great while. More frequent and long-term evaluations make it easier to notice changes in an employee’s work habits and performance. This can be a great tool for preventing burnout. Suppose a staff member’s progress has leveled off or decreased. In that case, it could be that they are feeling a sense of stagnation with their job or a lack of recognition and might benefit significantly from additional responsibilities or an improved system of accountability. On a related note, team members who are recognized and rewarded for improving over time are more likely to continue their upward progress.
Review With the Employee – Be Specific and Honest
Giving feedback, in particular negative feedback, is an extremely delicate process. This is doubly true in cases in which the evaluation is tied to a financial consequence. Too harsh, and the employee may give up and quit altogether. Too light, and they might not fully realize that they need to make changes.
Another complicating factor is that receiving feedback is largely tied to personality. Some people thrive on praise, others prefer an approach that focuses on what they can do to improve.
In most cases, it is best to simply and clearly state what the employee can do to get better results on their next review.
Sugar coating and using euphemisms can be seen as demeaning or just confusing. While some experts promote techniques such as the “compliment sandwich” as an attempt to cushion the blow, others say that it both diminishes the meaningfulness of the compliments and takes attention away from constructive criticism, which might be dismissed.
Ultimately, the best practice seems to be trusting that your employees are adults that have the emotional maturity to handle honest, specific feedback about areas they could improve.
Ask For Feedback
What better way to know how your staff feels about your evaluation system than simply asking them? Even better, give your employees the opportunity to leave feedback about your evaluation procedures anonymously, so they don’t feel pressured to mention only the positive aspects. All too often, management implements a new procedure or system without consulting the employees who will actually be using it on how it might affect their day-to-day tasks. Take the time to ask for honest feedback; you might be surprised at how much people have to say. With that feedback, you’ll want to quickly make changes to your processes, so employees see that you take feedback seriously. Jolt allows you to quickly change your processes with the click of a button, whether it’s one location, or thousands.
“Even with new employees, there’s no reason for error. They have access to everything they need in Jolt, which allows me to focus on my business instead of spending the majority of my time training.”
Increase Employee Performance With These Solutions
Jolt Lists
Jolt Information Library
Jolt Communication Manager
Learn More
How Jolt Can Help
Jolt offers software solutions for a full range of employer needs. This software, designed in conjunction with business resources and organizational experts, has helped countless business owners and managers better train, evaluate, and schedule their staff.
Jolt’s employee performance software includes features that help your business stay better organized, reduce expenses, and improve sales and growth. Perhaps most importantly, your company can meet its productivity and financial goals all while enabling your employees to be happier, more loyal, and more service minded.
From fully customizable gamified training programs to hassle-free scheduling software and long-term employee task management solutions, Jolt has what you need to take your business operations to the next level.
Employee Performance Features
- Training Hub
- Incorporate Training Materials In-App
- Role-Based Access to Content
- One-Click Distribution of Content
- Customizable Training Checklists
- Scorable Employee Quizzes
- Menu & Food Certifications
- Performance Review Templates
- Schedule, Shift, and Break Management
- Drag-and-Drop Schedule Builder
- Easily Swap Shifts In-App
- Shift Reminders by Text
- Employee Time Clock
- Easily Approve Time-Off Requests
- View Labor Reports & Forecast Costs
- Message Blasts & Announcements