How to Measure Employee Performance (The performance management series)
Jack Zigon
A step-by-step workbook that shows managers and employees how to create clear, results-based performance measures, goals, and tracking systems for any job—even hard-to-measure white-collar work.
Clear expectations are one of the most reliable levers for improving employee performance, yet most organizations struggle to define what 'a good job' looks like for jobs in R&D, marketing, HR, and customer service. Jack Zigon's How to Measure Employee Performance distills 23 years of consulting into a practical, seven-step process: review organizational goals, identify a position's customers and their needs, list the results (not activities) the job produces, weight those results by importance, create general and specific measures, set numeric ranges and descriptive goals, and design a lightweight tracking system for feedback. Backed by 40 real-world example performance plans across dozens of job families, the guide turns vague duties into verifiable, observable measures—giving employees the feedback they need to self-correct and giving managers a fair, focused basis for evaluation and reward.
The model it argues
A framework linking design levers (customer alignment, results definition, weighting, measures, goals, tracking systems) to psychological and behavioral states (clarity of expectations, feedback receipt, self-correction) and ultimately to performance and organizational outcomes.
Key ideas
- Organizational Goal Alignment
- The linkage between a position's results/measures and the documented goals of the organization and manager.
- Customer Needs Identification
- Correct identification of a position's internal and external customers and the products/services they require.
- Results Orientation
- Defining performance as value-added outputs (results) rather than activities.
- Result Weighting
- Assigning relative importance to results by distributing 100 percentage points.
- Measure Quality
- The verifiability, observability, and appropriateness of measures for each result.
- Goal Setting Quality
- The degree to which goals meet criteria of verifiability, achievability, practicality, ranges, and defined meets/exceeds levels.
- Tracking System Effectiveness
- The quality of documents and procedures used to collect and summarize performance data for feedback.
- Clarity of Expectations
- Employees' understanding of what results are expected and what meets versus exceeds performance.