Why Performance Reviews Are Important for Hourly Workers

Performance reviews for hourly workers are a crucial — but often overlooked — aspect of managing a frontline team. 

For HR professionals and frontline leaders, they provide an opportunity to make data-driven performance decisions, proactively address developing issues, and improve turnover rates. 

For hourly workers, performance evaluations are a great opportunity to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, interact with HR managers, and become more efficient at completing their tasks. 

Yet, hourly employee performance reviews are often neglected or pushed aside by HR teams.

If you want to learn how effective performance management can benefit your organization and ways to get started, book a demo with Secchi for a comprehensive breakdown. 

5 Reasons Why Performance Reviews Are Important for Hourly Frontline Workers 

Improved Turnover Rates 

According to HR Daily Advisor, 50% of hourly employees quit within the first 120 days on the job. 

For some frontline industries, the prospects of worker retention are rather glum. More than 100,000 nurses — or 1.8% of the nationwide workforce — left the field in 2021. 22% of frontline nurses are planning to do the same in 2023.

In the age of Great Resignation, improving turnover rates should be on every organization’s agenda — and effective performance reviews can help. 

According to Gallup, implementing regular feedback can decrease turnover rates up to 15% when compared with employees who don’t receive feedback. 

Why? 

Regular evaluations can boost employee motivation and desire to get recognized. 

This is especially true for hourly workers, who may feel less appreciated when compared with salaried team members. 

Additionally, regular feedback exchange between managers and employees can increase morale and lead to better performance. 

The bottom line is that workers are less likely to leave a workplace where they feel engaged and supported. 

Performance reviews, when done right, can help your organization do just that. 

Proactive Problem-Solving

Regular performance reviews give you the information you need to address overlooked gaps and problems before they develop into more serious issues. 

The end goal of performance appraisal is to ensure that employees are doing their best to maximize efficiency and keep your organization running smoothly. 

Having regular performance conversations can help you to: 

• Reveal your employees’ strengths and weaknesses
• Identify areas for improvement and additional training 
• Give constructive feedback 
• Create action plans 

Research shows that there’s a 40% reduction in work output with one bad apple in the workgroup. 

With performance management software like Secchi, you can identify potential issues early on and address them proactively. This will not only result in higher performance for your team, but also in better employee engagement. 

Efficient Attendance Tracking

Absenteeism comes at a high cost, including loss of company morale, lower productivity levels, and high replacement costs. 

(In fact, replacing an $8/hour employee can cost your organization up to $3,500 — not to mention the time and resources spent on training a new candidate.) 

Tracking attendance and enforcing discipline helps improve engagement levels and overall turnout. 

Moreover, regular attendance reviews can lead you to uncover potential deeper issues within your policies or management. If absenteeism is a repeating pattern for your organization, there might be larger issues at play. 

Tracking attendance is especially tricky with hourly employees. This is where having functional performance management software is especially important. Secchi reduces time from incident to corrective action by greater than 50%, while improving the documentation and consistency of the actions taken. 

Ability to Make Data-Driven Performance Decisions

This may be the biggest reason why performance reviews are important. 

A study by Deloitte found that companies that use performance analytics “outperform their peers in quality of hire, retention, and leadership capabilities.”

This is because they give you reliable data regarding your employees' performance that, over time, shows you patterns that you can use to make important decisions. 

Traditional annual performance reviews don’t work for fast-moving frontline industries because things change too quickly for the collected data to be valuable. 

Implementing regular reviews gives you significantly more data to make performance decisions that’ll reduce repeated mistakes and improve team output.

More Effective Training 

Properly onboarding and training your hourly employees is the first step to better performance, employee engagement, and higher productivity levels. 

A solid performance review process can help you identify gaps in your training and onboarding experiences, so your employees feel set up for success from the get-go. 

This will result in fewer mistakes and a smoother workflow going forward. 

Performance Reviews Tips

Now that we’ve covered why performance reviews are important, here are 3 tips on conducting them successfully for consistent high performance and reduced turnover rate. 

1. Provide Recognition 

Hourly workers often feel undervalued and unappreciated. 

Recognizing their hard work, strengths, and achievements can lead to more productive conversations and improved engagement. 

While goal-setting may not be as relevant to hourly workers, there are still ways you can encourage and motivate your hourly team members. 

Some examples include: 

• Fair and accurate compensation 
• A rewards system 
• Asking them questions like “what would make your role better?” and “how can we offer you more opportunities?” 
• Flexibility and improved scheduling process 

Support and recognition can go a long way for all team members, but especially for frontline hourly workers. 

2. Offer Career Development Opportunities

Offering development opportunities helps hourly employees feel that they’re growing in their role and are not “stuck” in the same place.

You can provide continued education and training on and off-site, as well as in the form of mentoring programs. 

It won’t only result in higher engagement, but will also help your organization grow with a better-qualified workforce. 

Secchi allows you to identify coaching moments as it pertains to performance. For example, if you identify an employee with a high number of absences then you can create a coaching moment that says “you have a noticeable pattern of absences, let’s talk about how we can improve.”

3. Stay Organized 

Performance reviews for hourly employees often don’t make it to the top of HR agenda. 

This is because performance reviews for hourly workers can be confusing and more cumbersome to track than for salaried employees. 

Yet, skipping reviews or neglecting them can make a negative impression on your hourly employees and contribute to the feelings of being undervalued. 

If you know that it’s time to move your human resources team away from manual performance tracking, read more on a better process below. 

Process of a Performance Review 

Manual performance review process can be disorganized and frustrating because it involves too many steps. In the end, endless Excel sheets hurt productivity levels and don’t allow for enough efficiency.

Secchi is a performance management software designed to simplify hourly performance management for more clarity and better results across the workspace. 

With Secchi, HR no longer has to be the admin who pulls files or tells the supervisor the appropriate level of discipline. They move from admins to strategic partners in performance management by maximizing documentation while minimizing administration.  

Book a demo today to start streamlining your performance management.