Whether you’re a project manager or a CEO of a company, you’re most likely want to know how your team’s doing. As a leader of the team, you’re responsible for setting direction and expressing expectations, so, naturally, you want to know if your employees are meeting them.
Granted, you can always assess team performance based on some milestones or outcomes. For example, if we’re talking about a project team, you could argue that their effectiveness can be measured based on whether the project was successful. Unfortunately, such an evaluation has some significant flaws. First of all, it could be misleading. Projects fail for multiple reasons, so you can’t tell much based on the outcome itself: you need to dig deeper. On top of that, when you evaluate your team only after a particular project is complete, you miss out on a chance to optimize and improve their work. This is why, in this blog post, we’ll show you how to monitor team performance regularly and identify improvement opportunities.
What is Teamdeck?
All of the reports shown in this article can be easily configured in Teamdeck. It’s a resource management solution used by dozens of agencies, consultancies, or software companies. This app allows you to assign your employees to different projects, track their time, and manage their availability. A robust reporting suite is one of the strongest features of Teamdeck: it empowers team leaders to gain a better understanding of how their teams work and how effective they are. Based on these reports, PMs and managers can make better decisions supported by data.
How to Evaluate Team Performance with Teamdeck?
You can use Teamdeck’s reports to evaluate different aspects of your team’s effectiveness. Read on to get a step by step instruction on how to create each of team performance reports presented below. You can also schedule a call with one of our resource management experts: together, we’ll build a perfect reporting dashboard for you to measure your team’s effectiveness.
Calculate Employee Productivity Rate
Employee Productivity is a great metric to measure how much money your employees bring to the company. Monitoring this will also be useful if one of your business objectives is to calculate the most profitable projects/clients, which is a common need for agencies or consultancies. Let’s open a report that already has Employee Productivity metrics set up.
Teamdeck comes up with a couple of report templates. One of them, called KPIs, is especially useful for creating team performance reports. Log in to your account, head to reports, and create a new one using this template.
You’ll see a table called Sales KPI. Here, you can track a couple of key performance metrics:
- Productivity – how much money was made by your employees (calculated based on your client rates)
- Employee Productivity Rate – money made per one employee
- Employee cost – the cost of your employees (calculated based on their rates)
- ROI (Return on Investment) – the profit made by your employees.
The formulas for these metrics have already been predefined in Teamdeck, but you can edit them by clicking on Metrics and selecting the formula you want to change.
When you generate this report for the first time, you’ll see that it is empty. This is because you need to populate the Internal Rate and External Rate columns first. These work like Excel cells: simply type in the correct value. The internal rate is how much money your employee earns per hour of work. The external rate is how much you charge your clients for an hour of work.
You can define one rate for the whole team or expand the table and assign their own rates to everyone in your company. As you fill out the cells, you’ll see that the rest of the table updates automatically. Knowing your team’s rates, Teamdeck can calculate the rest based on people’s timesheets.
In the image above, average rates have been provided for the whole project teams.
You can also track the ROI of each individual employee: if you’re satisfied with their productivity but not happy about the ROI, it means you could improve your pricing strategy. Such an analysis helps you to get really valuable insights: judging just by the profit, you could say that the performance of your team is not up to par. However, a closer examination allows you to see that you need to charge a little bit more for your services.
Track ROI from different projects and positions
In the previous paragraphs, we discussed how to calculate ROI for your projects and individual team members. Now it’s time to create a simple chart that will help you to evaluate ROI values side by side:
You can tell at a glance which projects have generated the highest ROI in the previous weeks or months.
Additionally, you can calculate ROI for different roles within your company. Hourly rates usually differ for different job titles. Create a chart to measure which employees are responsible for generating the biggest profit for your business.
Frontend developers have generated 21% of your company’s overall ROI.
Compare estimates with actuals
One of the critical signs of an effective team is that they’re able to deliver on their estimates. This is why a “estimates vs. actuals” report is a good way of measuring performance.
Teamdeck stores data about the planned hours (bookings) as well as the actual working time (timesheets). A simple bar chart can show you the difference between them:
Note that this chart is broken down into projects and then people. It’s a good idea to analyze your data on both levels. Of course, you’ll want to track the estimates vs. actuals at the project-level, as it corresponds directly to the project budget. However, looking at the granular data can help you understand the situation better. Look at the image above: the ACME Website project (first from the left) had more hours tracked than it had been expected. Analyzing each team member, however, you can tell that only one of them surpassed the bookings. Detailed evaluation can give you valuable insights about your team’s performance and teamwork.
Now that you know what happened, you might also want to know how it happened. In order to do this, we’ll try to investigate team performance over time. Create a line chart comparing bookings with timesheets to do so:
Here, you can see the performance of 3 different people over a month. Again, you have a chance to take a closer look at each employee. Take Davon, for example. Up until the middle of the month, they were recording fewer hours than estimated. It’s usually not something you should worry about, as people tend to add a safety buffer in their estimates. However, at one point, they started logging in significantly more tracked hours than the estimate would have us expect. Knowing what happened and how it happened, you can get to the source of this issue: perhaps someone else fell sick, and Davon had to put in some extra hours? Or perhaps his work was slower for some personal reasons? Either way, you’re now able to investigate this situation further instead of jumping to conclusions.
You can also compare estimates with actuals in a table. It’s especially handy when you also import booking and timesheet descriptions into your report:
Descriptions provide you with more insights regarding what your team members have been up to. Looking at the image above we can see that Rose was working pretty much according to the plan when she was working alone, preparing the assets. Her interactions with the client (workshops or asset reviews) took significantly longer than expected. It’s a very valuable insight to have and perhaps something to discuss with Rose in her 1on1 meeting.
Get data-driven to help your employees achieve their goals!
Of course, these are not the only team performance charts you can generate with Teamdeck. Depending on your business vertical and company structure, you can create many more reports to monitor your team’s effectiveness. A data-driven approach is fair towards your employees and provides opportunities for improvement.
Are you ready to better more insights about your team’s performance and productivity? Sign up for a free trial of Teamdeck and start collecting data that’s extremely valuable to your business. You’ll thank yourself later.
