Coming soon · Step-by-step Guide
How to Measure Employee Performance (The performance management series)
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.
This is a step-by-step procedural book — we're building it into Stepcode, with a profile to follow.
What it’s about
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 through-line
- Who it’s for
- A manager, employee, or HR professional who wants clear, fair performance measures for a position—even a hard-to-measure one.
- The problem
- They must define goals and measures for jobs where 'a good job' is vague and outputs are hard to quantify. They feel frustrated and uncertain, worried that evaluations will be subjective, unfair, or contested.
- The plan
- Review your organization's and manager's goals.
- Identify your position's customers and what they need.
- List your results (value-added outputs), not activities.
- Weight the results by importance using 100 percentage points.
- Create general and specific measures for each result.
- The payoff
- Clear, verifiable goals linked to organizational priorities. · Employees who self-correct because they get immediate, specific feedback. · Less stressful, more objective performance reviews.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
Additional reading
- Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Assessment and Development Centres; Best practice guidelines · British Psychological Society (BPS)
Cited by the author as an authoritative source for best practice, covering key issues like fairness, design, and evaluation that are central to the book's guidance.
- Assessment Centres (3rd edn) · C Woodruffe
Recommended for readers seeking a broader overview and history of the assessment centre method.
- The big five personality dimensions and job-performance; a meta-analysis · Barrick, M R and Mount, K M
Provides the empirical support for the book's caution against over-relying on personality tests in selection, a key topic in Chapter 5.
- A theory of the validity of predictors in selection · M Smith
Offers a theoretical framework for understanding why different selection tools have varying levels of effectiveness, underpinning the book's core argument.
- Competence at Work · Spencer, L M and Spencer, S M
A foundational text on the concept of competence, relevant to Chapter 2 on developing a competence framework.
- Development and Assessment Centres · Charles Woodruffe
Cited as a key text for readers wanting a more recent and in-depth exposition of assessment centre work, a core topic of the book.
- Performance Management: The new realities · Michael Armstrong and Angela Baron
The book uses Armstrong and Baron's definition of performance management as its foundation, making their work a primary source for understanding this core concept.
- The Competent Manager: A model for effective performance · R. F. Boyatzis
The author attributes the current usage and definition of 'competency' to Boyatzis, making this a foundational text for a central theme of the book.
- Appraisal and Feedback: Making performance review work · Clive Fletcher
Fletcher is cited as an authority on appraisals, a key one-to-one interaction within performance management, providing deeper insight into this specific practice.
- The Easy Guide to Repertory Grids · D. Jankowicz
The book presents the repertory grid as a powerful technique for developing interview models; this book is recommended as a highly accessible introduction to the method.