As remote work has grown and many companies have, willingly or otherwise, adopted this new way of working, a new concern has emerged:

the fear that employee productivity will decline or that product or service quality will suffer. This led us to ask:

How do you assess your remote employees so you can measure their performance and the positive or negative impact of remote work on

overall performance?

Beyond this question, there is a key point: assessing and evaluating employees will later help you develop a plan

Succession made easy: if you know how to successfully assess your employees remotely, you can tell high performers from those who are falling short,

and identify who deserves a promotion or perhaps a major leadership role in the company.

Here’s our answer to the question, “How do you assess your employees remotely?”

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Read also:How to Successfully Lead Remote Teams

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Quantity and quality

The key to evaluating remote employees is measuring both how much work each person completes and the quality of that work;

neither should be assessed without the other, unless the company focuses solely on quantity—or vice versa.

It’s also important to compare employees. If one employee completes a particular task within a certain amount of time, while another employee

does the same task and takes twice as long, you should take a closer look. You could set specific work hours

for employees working from home, but that approach may not be effective. Results are what matter.

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Results-based assessment

One of the key benefits of results-based management is that it focuses on actual outcomes. For example, it doesn’t matter how many hours an employee spends at their

desk each day; what matters is what they actually accomplish.

Of course, results shouldn’t be achieved haphazardly. They need to align with the standards and principles that must be followed, and that

is the manager’s responsibility: to explain how the work should be done—or, more precisely, the standards the product or service must meet, and so on.

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Read also:3 Important Tips for Addressing Remote Work Challenges

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Metrics and expectations

If you want to evaluate your employees remotely, you first need to establish the metrics against which you’ll assess their performance. At the same time, as a manager,

you must clearly explain to your employees what you expect of them and what you want them to actually do.

Clear expectations and an understanding of performance metrics will keep employees on the right track and help them do

what they need to do, and do it well.

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Trusting Employees

This trust isn’t directly related to hiring remote employees or evaluating their performance, yet its impact is decisive. What do you think

employees who know their manager doubts them will do? Will they excel at their work?

Managers should assume that employees are doing what they’re expected to do and giving their best to

move the work forward, unless there’s evidence to the contrary.

It’s true that we’ve already discussed the use of metrics and performance indicators, and how they can be used to assess employees’ commitment,

as well as evaluate their performance. However, it’s also true that performance in some roles can’t be assessed using these metrics.

So let’s look at the results—both quantity and quality—and use them as evidence of an employee’s commitment, or lack of it.