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Employee Performance Management Tools: Best Software to Measure Performance
Unlock the potential of your workforce with 14 cutting-edge tools designed to measure and enhance employee performance.
Table of Contents
Managers and leaders who notice that an employee’s work quality is dropping can use performance management tools to identify gaps in understanding and resolve the disconnect. Analyzing data from these tools can help pinpoint workflow challenges while holding teams accountable for their assignments.
We’ll highlight 14 tools that measure employee performance, share the benefits of using employee performance management tools, and list some best practices for responsible use.
What are performance management tools?
Performance management tools analyze employee performance and engagement against specific key performance indicators (KPIs). These platforms typically offer features like goal setting, project tracking and data analysis to help managers evaluate both individual and team performance.
As remote work plans become more prevalent, employee performance management tools are more critical than ever. When managing a remote team, it’s helpful to collect data like time spent on a project, idle time, time in a document and more. You can then use that information to assess an employee’s performance and provide formal or even informal feedback to improve performance and outcomes.
2. Basecamp
Basecamp organizes all your employees’ tasks and performance in one place so you can see progress on assignments in real time. Managers can view what each employee plans to work on for the day and whether they’ve completed their list by day’s end. This reduces unnecessary back-and-forth and empowers your team to manage their own workload.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution, keep in mind that Basecamp’s software doesn’t include built-in employee evaluation tools. However, it integrates with cloud-based employee performance management software like AssessTEAM.
3. ClickUp
ClickUp offers a wide range of features for employee management, including employee monitoring and engagement tools, time tracking, and productivity reports with real-time data and insights for managers. It comes with dozens of templates, including one-on-one meeting agendas, engagement surveys and action plans. It also functions as an effective goal-setting app. The Goals feature allows you to automate progress tracking toward team and individual objectives to further drive employee engagement.
4. Culture Amp
This employee experience platform adopts a culture-first approach so managers can better understand their team members and provide meaningful feedback. Culture Amp offers a robust template library for employee performance and engagement surveys, including opportunities for self-reflection and peer feedback, along with personalized development tools to drive professional growth and improved performance. It also includes features like turnover prediction and analytics to help organizations make informed decisions and deliver targeted outreach to employees.
5. DeskTime
Designed as a time-tracking app for businesses and freelancers, DeskTime can also be a valuable tool for business owners looking to measure employee performance. Managers can monitor employees’ time on specific projects and label different apps as productive, unproductive or neutral.
Additional DeskTime features include URL and app tracking, document-title tracking, idle time tracking, project time tracking and automatic screenshots to check for suspicious activity.
6. iDoneThis
iDoneThis is a collaborative tool companies can use to track employee performance and project progress. At the end of each workday, employees receive and respond to an email prompt and provide details on what they’ve accomplished throughout the day. The next morning, the entire team receives a digest of everyone’s updates from the day before. This keeps team members and managers aligned while empowering employees to monitor their own performance.
7. IntelliHR Performance Management
IntelliHR is a performance management tool that tracks employee performance continuously using people analytics. The software creates a performance summary dashboard for each employee, displaying tracked goals, training initiatives and achievements, and allows managers to automate employee review cycles. The data provided paints a clear picture of each team member’s performance, helping managers identify when a performance improvement plan is needed or when an employee deserves recognition (a great way to help employees feel appreciated).
8. Lattice
Lattice allows organizations to customize and run performance review cycles on their schedule, whether annually, quarterly or project-based. Managers can easily incorporate various sources of information, including peer feedback and integrations with goals, objectives and key results (OKRs), to write accurate and comprehensive employee reviews. Lattice also offers teams opportunities for real-time feedback, employee status updates and public praise.
9. monday.com
Managers who use monday.com as an employee workflow tool can create tasks in different categories and rate each as high, medium or low priority. Leaders can assign these tasks to specific employees, who update the status of their progress throughout the workday. Project updates include “working on it,” “complete” or “stuck” — the last of which signals to leaders that an employee needs assistance. Teams can also create custom status labels relevant to their workflows.
10. Paycor
Paycor is considered among the best online payroll services, but its performance management features are also excellent. It tracks various channels and sources of information — including employee reviews, data from one-on-one meetings, OKRs and other feedback channels — in a single location. Managers can leverage customizable templates to guide conversations around employee performance and gain individual and team insights from automatically generated reports pulled from gathered data and feedback. Our comprehensive review of Paycor explains more about its vast feature set, including robust employee recruitment and onboarding tools.
11. Peoplebox
Peoplebox helps businesses integrate goal alignment and talent management across their existing workflows and tools. Managers can run employee performance reviews using both built-in templates and customizable formats. Reviews can also incorporate information from OKRs and one-on-one meetings, which are supported on the platform, to provide more holistic feedback. One unique feature of Peoplebox is anonymous messaging, allowing employees to safely voice concerns or suggestions to their managers and help close the feedback loop. This is a valuable tool, as anonymity in employee feedback can lead to more candid conversations, uncover hidden issues and ultimately create a more supportive, transparent workplace.
12. PerformYard
PerformYard streamlines performance management strategies by making it easy for every employee to take part in the process. The platform supports 360 reviews, project-based reviews, rating scales, continuous feedback and cascading goals. Employees can focus on the feedback they receive directly within the application, which helps improve communication between employees, HR teams and managers.
13. Trakstar
End-to-end employee management system Trakstar helps managers measure and improve employee performance and engagement. It includes customizable performance evaluations with various types of questions and metrics, along with options for 360 feedback and self-evaluations. Managers can collaborate with their employees to set and track goals, as well as gain employee engagement insights through pulse surveys and regular check-ins.
14. Trello
Trello is a work and project management tool that organizes projects into columns on visual boards, helping teams monitor workflows and keep everyone aligned on project progress. Managers can create weekly or monthly to-do lists for employees, use cards to track individual tasks, and set up columns for different project phases. The platform’s notifications feature enables communication directly within the workspace, reducing the need for back-and-forth emails or external messaging apps.
What are the benefits of using employee performance tools?
Tracking employee performance can improve manager and employee relations by increasing transparency and ensuring teams stay on the same page. Here’s how companies can benefit from implementing employee performance management tools.
Identify strengths and areas for improvement.
By tracking different employee performance metrics with custom tools, leaders can identify areas where a team member thrives and where they may need support. From there, leaders can strategize a solution to address any issues.
“Organizations can evaluate employee competencies [and] skill gaps and provide coaching or development materials on time when they have real-time visibility into performance data,” explained Shivareddy Devarapalli, a senior engineer for Workday and an enterprise HCM technologist.
On an organizational level, this information allows you to delegate tasks to balance the team’s strengths and weaknesses so everyone feels confident in their work. It can also help you identify gaps in your workforce and indicate when it may be advantageous to bring on additional staff.
Understand (and increase) your return on investment (ROI).
Performance management tools can help you tie productivity metrics to your overall revenue, factoring in how much you pay each employee to determine how much value their employment provides your company.
The insights gained from these tools can guide changes that increase individual employee ROI, support smarter staffing decisions, and improve your company’s bottom line.
“Higher-quality performance management software enables higher-quality performance management decisions. And better performance equals higher revenue,” noted Alyssa Leo, principal at Leo+Co Enterprises. “HR investments are worth the dollars when they enable better business outcomes.”
Reduce your administrative burden.
Keeping up with performance reviews, check-ins and data collection can be tough when you’re focused on daily operations.
“Better software that is helping leaders check in in real time reduces the administrative burden both on people leaders as well as HR teams,” Leo explained.
Farin Lesch, director of HR at HR Transformed, agreed, emphasizing how the right software can keep managers on top of evaluations — and employees aware of their standing.
“Many companies that don’t utilize software find that they are behind on performance reviews and leave employees disappointed or unaware of their performance,” Lesch noted.
Empower employees through clarity and accountability.
For Brittany L. Truszkowski, chief operating officer at Grand Canyon Law Group, the biggest advantage of a structured, template-based performance management system has been increased clarity and accountability.
“People really know what’s expected of them, and managers no longer shirk their responsibility to have the hard conversations,” Truszkowski explained. “Our turnover went down and our team engagement went up — because expectations were clear, and so was movement.”
However, while employees are often more motivated to work efficiently when their managers use some form of user activity monitoring, you don’t want their efforts to come from a place of fear — nor do you want team members to feel like they’re being micromanaged with constant audits of their time. Instead, choose tools that track performance in the background and focus on clear, collaborative goal setting so employees feel supported rather than scrutinized.
Best practices for fair, goal-driven performance management
Used thoughtfully, employee performance management tools can help leaders support their staff, make better business decisions and boost their bottom line. Follow these tips to ensure your employee performance management systems are fair, unbiased and aligned with company goals.
Implement transparent, data-driven processes.
To keep evaluations impartial, equitable and in step with company goals, Devarapalli recommends using advanced HR technology designed to support transparency, consistency and adaptability.
“The talent development team should be in charge of an organized procedure with well-defined goals and competencies that are applied uniformly throughout the company,” Devarapalli said.
Once goals are set, transparency into the process and ongoing progress is key. Devarapalli recommends tools that enable two-way feedback between managers and employees, with security controls that provide each party with the appropriate level of visibility.
Choose tools that fit your organization’s needs.
When choosing an employee performance management tool, Lesch recommends starting with a clear understanding of your audience. For example, does your team want all the bells and whistles, or do they prioritize a simpler, more intuitive and user-friendly design?
Whether you adopt a streamlined approach or a more detailed one, some basic capabilities to look for in a performance management tool include the following:
- Goal and competency setting and tracking
- Clear feedback loops
- Analytics and reporting dashboards
- Customization features for different users and needs
- An intuitive interface
- Easy integration with your existing systems and data
Train managers to conduct unbiased reviews.
Leo emphasized that performance management and evaluation tools are only as fair as the systems and managers using them, so detailed training should be a top priority.
“The training needs to explain how to use the tool, but more importantly, what a strong performance evaluation looks like,” Leo explained. “The more robust and specific definitions and expectations are, the less room there is for inequality.”
Beyond training at the individual level, larger organizations with multiple leaders should also ensure all parties are calibrated on definitions of success.
“We hold quarterly manager huddles to review evaluations as a group — so one person’s ‘exceeds expectations’ isn’t another person’s ‘meets,'” Truszkowski said. “We also developed KPIs connected to the company’s objectives, so performance conversations were based on impact, not emotion.”
Finally, remember that training shouldn’t begin or end with a specific tool or initiative. Lesch stressed the importance of educating and training managers as soon as they step into a leadership role.
“Learning how to be fair and unbiased is a learned behavior,” Lesch said. “If a business puts time into staff to teach them how to pour more into their teams, they will see their staff engaged in meeting company goals.”
Danielle Fallon-O’Leary contributed to this article.
