How Do You Measure Remote Employees’ Performance?

Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.

Happy Friday!

This week’s question comes from Cleyton Messias, who asks:

It’s been said many times, but whether deliberately or not, one of the biggest problems with the traditional office model is that for many companies, it has turned “hours worked” into a performance metric.

We don’t work on production lines where we need specific stations staffed at specific times, nor do we simply need warm bodies to be “present.” Showing up isn’t the same as getting things done.

In a perfect world, co-located businesses would realize the same thing, and the best approach for measuring remote employees’ performance would be no different than measure the performance of someone who works from the company’s office.

To me, that means measuring employees based on:

1. Output: Are they productive in whatever hours they choose to work? Is their work product good? Does their work contribute to the business?
2. Drive: Do they set and strive to achieve aggressive goals? Do they try to be better this week than they were last week?
3. Teamwork: Are they a positive influence on the team? Do they make the people around them better? Do people like working with them?

To actually measure these things, take a combination of:

1. Your own gut instinct (see my answer to question #1).
2. Peer reviews from the team.
3. Metrics that are specific to their role; each role is different, so you need to find metrics that can measure the effectiveness of their output (for example, a customer support agent might be measured in customer satisfaction).

Hope that helps!