Simple Performance Management Tracking Template
This is the bare bones of what it takes to keep track of performance on your team. I want to be abundantly clear, this is not a tool to hold over your team and review weekly. “Bella, you’re doing fantastic, look at all these +2s. Bill, oof, looots of -2s here.”
The tool is intended to help you get a quick assessment of who might need coaching, encouragement, or focused training. It is a high-level look to pattern-match and quantify something that is generally extremely subjective. A byproduct of this template is you can use it on yourself as well!
Once you’ve taken a look and read on, please let me know what you think about these templates. I’m always looking to make them more meaningful.
Performance management is a big topic, but let’s stay tight in this particular instance and not worry too much about the details. Instead, let’s assess how we can get a quick understanding of how our team is doing day-to-day and over a longer span of time.
I use a similar tool when I am working through performance management, and found it to be highly effective.
Why This Is Helpful
Our brains are real jerks when it comes to thinking about something that happened months ago. When we don’t jot down our thoughts or notes from a day, we’ll likely forget anything that is not critical shortly thereafter. A major complaint when it comes to performance reviews (specifically when they’re done once or twice per year) is that managers lean into recency bias, forgetting what happened the first five months of the period and focusing only on the most recent month.
Recency bias is not intentional, it’s how our brains process information. Instead of relying on your brain to remember everything, what if you had an easy way to take note of the performance of your team day-to-day? The template explanation below aims to help with the quick note-taking of how performance is trending on a team.
Let’s dive in.
A Sliding Scale
Quantitative data around real-time performance is difficult in software engineering, especially the further into engineering leadership you go. What starts as very tactical (tickets completed, PRs reviewed/pushed, etc) turns to very subjective (are folks still engaged, are they inspired to do their work), so how can you keep track?
Put simply, you can boil every interaction down into a number. I like to use -2 through +2 in this case to identify neutrality and the extremes (let me know in the comments if you want further examples of what each number might look like).
-2 - This is really bad. The interaction was poor, and way under what I expected from the individual. Should be an outlier.
-1 - Not quite what you want to see, but maybe there was a lack of clarity or understanding. The interaction could be improved, but not the end of the world.
0 - Meets expectations. Nothing unusual in either direction and the individual was doing what was asked.
+1 - The interaction was better than expected and is a positive example of what going above and beyond looks like.
+2 - Blown away by the interaction, tremendous growth shown by the individual and unsustainable high performance.
As with all things, these numbers are subjective, BUT it starts to get us closer to quantifiable performance tracking. The goal is not to have all +2s forever, the goal is to skew toward the positive. Day-to-day that number may adjust and that’s totally okay. Focus on the averages. By week, by month, weighted, whatever it takes.
The Scale In Practice
Here’s a fake team I created for the template. On your team, you have six engineers: Brittany, Bob, Blake, Bill, Bella, and Brenda. These members are stored in columns, while the dates of work are in rows. For this example, we have a 7-day work week that everyone loves (there are never any complaints about working 56-hour weeks consistently, no way). I shouldn’t need to say this, but please don’t start a 7-day workweek at your company.
I’ve color-coded the cells with a min of -2 and a max of +2, to give a visual assessment of how someone is doing. From a quick look, without thinking about numbers, who is doing well (green or white) and who is not doing well (red).
Pretty quickly you can see you’ll probably need to work with Bill and Brenda. The pattern shows you that Bill may be pulling out of a negative few weeks, while Brenda is a bit more sporadic and starting to trend negative.
Blur your eyes a bit and look at the above. What else do you see? As a manager, you should be able to quickly determine any patterns (if you can’t that’s alright, it’s all about practice). My thoughts from the quickly generated random numbers:
Bella is my most consistent performer. Steady at +1s, jumping into +2s, she’s probably someone who is nearing promotion or is a steadily high-performing individual. How does Bella continue to perform so well? Can you take that formula and share it with others?
Bob is another consistent individual, minus two weeks from 12/14 - 12/22. What about that week was different? What might have happened and how did he recover so well from it? The recovery is likely a bright spot you can use for others as well.
I’m worried about Bill and Brenda. Brenda is having a particularly rough December and Bill seems to be coming out of a rut. These are the two individuals I would be focusing on for performance management. Are they too far gone? Can they recover? What changed that they are not doing as well as previously?
What other questions do you get from the patterns above? Let me know in the comments below.
General Assessment
I’ve added some averages and further breakdown of the data (auto-updated as more numbers get added or changed).
Note I didn’t go so far as to break it into all of the numbers. I’m interested in an exact count here, but a general understanding of where the team sits.
Do they have more “Above” interactions?
What is the breakdown between categories?
I have 3 team performance scales in my mind that relate to the percentage breakdown of Below, Neutral, and Above.
This is not scientific, it is a gut reaction to the question, “what percentage of each category is shown by a High-performing, Solidly performing, and a Low-performing team?” Not exact by any means and each organization is different, but you can get a quick check for how the team is doing. Our 6B team is an interesting mix, but I would put them as “Solid” overall. More Above interactions than Below, but still with 33% Below.
An uneven balance like this shows me that the team fluctuates quite a bit and is inconsistent in their behaviors and likely their work as well.
Closing Thoughts
Every manager will use this tool differently, so I won’t go into extreme detail on how to use it. Instead, consider how you currently track patterns for your teams and individuals.
Where do you struggle with performance management currently? Let me know in the comments below or directly on LinkedIn!