Keeping tabs on employee performance and let them know that this performance is visible are important ingredients of business success. On the one hand, employers get a better hold of how their workforce performs. On the other hand, the performance visibility and subsequent accountability push employees to do their best. Employee status and progress reports offer the insight that employers need to achieve these two things. This is also the major reason why employee status/progress report is a staple feature in all the good people management tools.
Large organizations have dedicated people management tools at their disposal to ensure optimal performance from the workforce. In contrast, many SMEs still stick to old non-scientific ways to determine employee status and progress. Those out-of-date methods to gauge employee performance are full of loopholes and bias and thus don’t draw the right picture.
Therefore, SMEs also need to embrace solutions that can generate systematic, well-thought-out, and impartial employee status reports. In this post, we will outline different ways in which employee status reports can help with people management. We are doing this to convince small businesses to make it a part of their HR operations through people management tools.
People Management Tools: What Are They?
Before delving into discussing the importance of employee status reports, it is important to shed light on people management tools. People management tools are essentially the software solutions that help organizations improve employee experience and workplace productivity simultaneously. People management tools boast features through which companies can manage how their staff work, behave, engage, and grow.
Automated employee status report generation is an integral element of people management tools. It is a single report from where organizations can know how their employees work, behave, engage, and grow. In this post, we will primarily focus on this important instrument of people management software.
5 Ways Employee Status Report Helps with People Management
Employment status reports help with people management in more than one way.
1. It Improves Operational Visibility without Relying on Micromanagement
Micromanagement might make managers appear diligent and proactive. However, it is not a good organizational practice by any means. Various studies suggest that micromanagement does more harm than good. It stubs out the creative spark among the workforce, hushed them, and often eventually leads to a higher turnover. An employee status report proves to be a better substitute for micromanagement for the operational visibility managers strive for.
With employee status reports, managers can monitor and track the fine details of work and employee performance without relying on intrusive and interruptive micromanagement tactics. When employees know that they can focus on their work without answering managers all the time, they tend to work better and in a less stressful setting.
2. It Offers an Opportunity to Build Mutual Trust
An ideal workplace scenario is where managers know that they have the back of employees and vice versa. Employee status reports can help organizations to have that mutual trust among their workforce. Discussing an employee status report opens a great window of opportunity for supervisors and workers to strengthen their bond. This meeting can serve as a great way to iron out differences, address misunderstandings and bolster the working relationship.
From the worker’s perspective, discussions at employee status reports are a way to put across their concerns and the problems they face executing certain tasks and completing specific projects. From managers’ standpoint, these meetings allow them to talk about the relevant work pain points without appearing condescending.
3. It Identifies Red Flags before It Is too Late
No organization wants to waste time with people who are not honest or don’t take their work seriously. However, HR departments and supervisors know about such staff members when they have done significant damage to the organization’s interests. Employment status reports also come in handy in identifying such chinks in the organizational armor – thanks to people management tools.
A well-thought-out employee status report has enough information for higher-ups to sense if anything is wrong. Little to no progress on tasks, clocking in late and clocking out early, lack of clarity on objectives; there is a list of details in employee status reports from which managers can identify the workers they need to diligently watch out for in the future.
4. It Lets You Make Decisions Based on Data, Not Guesswork and Bias
You can’t do good people management with personal biases, and there is no way one can completely get rid of their prejudices. Humans are wired to have biases and preferences in their everyday affairs. For managers and supervisors, this intrinsic behavioral element is not a suitable thing while reviewing employee performance.
A data-oriented employee status report helps managers steer clear of personal biases and make appraisal and promotion decisions on merit. When employees know that their performance is being evaluated without the guesswork and assumptions rooted in bias, they remain satisfied with the managerial decisions.
5. It Sets off Voluntarily Improvement among Employees
As mentioned at the beginning of the post, employees tend to work better when they know that they operate in a transparent and accountable environment. Workspaces where employee status reports are an integral part of work updates and performance evaluation, people start working better on their own without needing constant nudging from their managers and supervisors. This voluntary improvement creates a win-win situation, i.e., employees experience desirable career growth, and employers improve their productivity index.
SimplyHRMS: A HRM Application and Employee Management Software
SimplyHRMS is primarily an HRM application. However, it also has the features of people management tools. Case in point: the automated generation of employee status reports. Small and medium-scale enterprises can use this all-in-one software to handle their HR affairs as well as improve people management.
SimplyHRMS is a software solution developed by Microsys whose mission is to deliver affordable and high-quality technology solutions that enable small, medium, and enterprise businesses to meet their goals more efficiently.
