Team performance is a crucial factor for organizational effectiveness, but how do you define and measure it? In this article, you will learn about some common frameworks and methods to assess and improve your team's performance, as well as some best practices and pitfalls to avoid.
Team performance is the extent to which a team achieves its goals and objectives, as well as the quality and quantity of its outputs and outcomes. Team performance can be influenced by various factors, such as team composition, structure, processes, communication, leadership, culture, and context. Team performance can also be evaluated from different perspectives, such as individual, team, or organizational level.
To define team performance evaluation, we need to establish specific and clear objectives for our team, and the criteria to measure them.
Performance management is setting clear expectations over someone’s role. It’s using different frameworks to go back to these expectations, measure the results and behaviors that made those possible. It’s helping your employee or team member understand patterns, create paths to achieve better or different outcomes. But most importantly, it’s not pointing fingers or measuring capacity, it’s caring for potential and the happiness of the employee or team member.
Performance management involves establishing behavioral goals, following up to identify the gap between the current and desired behavior profile, and then planning, implementing and monitoring changes in order to close the gaps. It seems simple, but it is challenging to align strategic goals, team goals and individual goals. If one of these perspectives are left out, you may see problems to execute your strategy due to lack of clarity, alignment or engagement.
In my view team performance is indeed the valuable output of the team and should be linked back to the overall value you are trying to create for the business. Measuring points directly can be misleading and I have seen teams just crank up the point value on tasks to look better so it ends up being pointless... You have to track the value delivered, the actual useful output, but also the creativity, innovation and quality of the work being done. Keeping an eye on rework, or faults, and problems at go-live can help keep quality in line as well. Making sure the team takes accountability for the wins and losses and learns from them both.
Team performance is important because it affects the overall performance and success of the organization. Teams that perform well can deliver better results, enhance customer satisfaction, increase innovation, foster collaboration, and improve employee engagement and retention. Teams that perform poorly can cause delays, errors, conflicts, dissatisfaction, and turnover. Therefore, measuring and improving team performance can help organizations achieve their strategic goals and sustain their competitive advantage.
In my experience, an organization can have a well designed plan, but without team alignment, engagement, and motivation, optimal performance most likely will not be achieved. The most aspirational organizations that we have observed, concentrate heavily on employee inputs such as coaching, learning, listening, and two-way feedback.
Team performance is critical and should be greater than the sum of its parts. Just having a bunch of individuals working misses a whole raft of benefits that you get from collaboration, like more innovative and creative designs, less mistakes, faster solutions to problems and issues. All of which can help a company stand out against the competition.
To define team performance, you need to establish clear and specific goals and objectives for your team, as well as the criteria and indicators to measure them. You can use different frameworks and models to guide you, such as the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) approach, the Balanced Scorecard, or the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method. You should also align your team's goals and objectives with the organization's vision, mission, and values, and communicate them to your team members and stakeholders.
That is a hard question, in my view we tend to associate team performance to it's efficiency, but how can we measure creativity, accountability, integrity and other aspects that make a team great. I like to think in terms of outcome generates (such the level of impact on OKRs), in terms of productivity (how much work team is able to deliver), and in terms of its internal dynamic and collaboration (more of a qualitative assessment around team communication patterns, ability to quickly converge into decisions, etc).
In my experience, it is better to use Objectives and Key results, which you can link back to the original business value you are trying to create. With good results, you can use this to edify the team and provide a reward. SMART goals miss the point of feedback and recognition which is important to creating momentum in a team. A reward can be just giving the team recognition for great results in a wider company audience.
To measure team performance, you need to collect and analyze data and feedback from various sources, such as team members, customers, managers, and other teams. You can use different tools and methods to gather and process the information, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, audits, reports, dashboards, or analytics. You should also use both quantitative and qualitative measures, as well as both lagging and leading indicators, to capture the full picture of your team's performance.
From my experience working over short interactions with tasks estimated as precise as possible, will provide data to build metrics about the team's performance in base of the workload given. After some short interactions we can analysing the data trough these metrics and build KPIs useful like for example the tasks created, done and remaining grouped by type of tasks per each interaction, then we will have trustable information that allow us forecast the success (or failed) of larger interactions.
One thing I have learned to watch is what metrics you are using to measure teams and how you use them for feedback. Often several things happen, upper management starts taking the stats literally and starts using them to beat people or teams up. Humans will bend the system to look better, especially other less scrupulous teams that want to stay under the radar. The stats don't link to the actual business value you ultimately want and this breeds the wrong behaviours. You need to make links to the real business value you are aiming to create, demo's to the customer on real progress is so much more than stats on points or progress made. It can instill confidence and get useful feedback from the customer.
To improve team performance, you need to identify and address the gaps and issues that affect your team's performance, as well as the strengths and opportunities that can enhance it. You can use different techniques and strategies to improve your team's performance, such as setting SMART goals, providing regular feedback, coaching and mentoring, facilitating collaboration and communication, resolving conflicts, recognizing and rewarding achievements, promoting learning and development, or implementing changes and innovations.
In my experience there are three key things to creating the best highest performing teams, creating a psychologically safe team, having even and fair communication, and having a mission or target that is understood by the team. You now have an environment for fearless collaboration and a clearly understood goal. The team can now self-organise and tell you what it needs, where the issues are, and what could make the solution better. This level of responsibility brings in accountability and pride, and with open feedback (not blaming) and retrospection, the team can build to be better and better. Take a look at the MIT 2008 study on High-performance teams and the work Google did in between 2011-16, it all points the same way.
Once we get to build a solid team ,It is important to keep the same structure, motivation and interaction among the team members , the reliance and respect between them is a high important value to keep and communication should be always open and transparent. The constructive feedbacks from customers should be taken as new opportunity to enhance. The reports of performance should be shared and analysed with the team in order to get a list of actions to take oriented to the continuous improvement. The retrospective meetings will give us a great tool to get that information and take actions raised by the team
When defining and measuring team performance, it is important to involve team members and stakeholders in the process of setting goals, collecting data, and analyzing results. Additionally, goals and measures should be reviewed and updated periodically to reflect changing needs and expectations. Celebrating successes and learning from failures is also important. Multiple sources and methods of measurement should be used to avoid bias and distortion, while data and feedback should be used to inform decisions and actions, not to judge or blame. Conversely, some pitfalls to avoid include setting vague or unrealistic goals, focusing only on results or outputs, ignoring qualitative aspects of team performance, relying on outdated or inaccurate data or feedback, and using the data to micromanage team members.