Behavior Monitoring and Its Role in Evaluating Employee Performance in Companies

What is Behavior Monitoring?

You can’t always know what someone is thinking, but you can observe how they behave. When using behavior monitoring to assess employee performance, it provides reliable information about how an employee acts.

The concept of behavior monitoring originates from psychology and relies on managers or other observers to assess the frequency of employee behaviors, typically aligning with company values and focusing on behavior rather than results.

For remote employees, it can be challenging for managers to know how often coworkers help one another or how they treat people daily. There can also be instances of communication breakdown with remote employees.

For example, if two sales representatives are evaluated based solely on results, the one who sells the most products would receive a higher rating. However, with behavior monitoring, the person with a higher rating may not be the one who sells the most but rather the one who displays the desired behavior.

What is a Behavior Monitoring Scale?

This scale measures the behaviors you want the employee to exhibit. It doesn’t answer the question, “Did the employee succeed?” with a simple yes or no. Instead, it ranks employees according to a specific scale.

For example, a five-point scale might ask the manager how often the employee exhibited a particular behavior:

Almost never.
Rarely.
Sometimes.
Often.
Almost always.

These choices provide a more realistic approach to rating behavior across various actions. The scores are then aggregated to determine overall performance.

Behavior monitoring

Behavior Monitoring Scale for Performance Evaluation:

This scale is a popular method for assessing employee performance because it is reliable and easy to use. It differs from results-based performance assessments by focusing on behavior rather than outcomes.

When to Use a Behavior Monitoring Scale?

With many people working remotely, companies often mention that they can no longer use face-to-face sessions to judge someone’s performance. Since not everyone works in the same place, forcing employees to keep their cameras on all day isn’t a viable solution, but this doesn’t mean you can’t use a behavior monitoring scale to evaluate remote employees.

This scale works better for some jobs than others. For example, jobs without clear, measurable outcomes are often better assessed using behavior monitoring than just using a results scale.

It’s difficult to determine how many lawsuits your company can avoid by having good HR practices, but using a behavior monitoring scale can help identify top-performing employees.

In roles where productivity is clearly measured, such as in a call center, a behavior monitoring scale may not be the best way to assess overall employee performance. However, it can be used alongside results monitoring to evaluate both the quantity of work and how well employees embody organizational values.

This method differs from Behavioral Anchored Rating Scales (BARS), but they are similar. BARS defines specific behaviors for each performance level, offering more accuracy but requiring a job-specific design, which can be time-consuming.

A good behavior monitoring scale or BARS will include a section for company values across all departments and another focused on job-specific behaviors. This allows managers to evaluate fairly and gather comprehensive performance data across the company.

Advantages of Using a Behavior Monitoring Scale:

Ideal for evaluating employees whose roles cannot be solely assessed based on productivity, as some jobs have harder-to-define performance levels.
Saves time compared to BARS, as it takes less time to develop.
Allows for the comparison of employee performance across the board.
Provides insights into company values across departments, making it a valuable tool for assessing leadership and employee behavior.

Be sure to use the behavior monitoring scale as part of the evaluation process, rather than as the final tool for performance assessment.

Conclusion:

To make your behavior monitoring scale effective in evaluating performance, it needs to be tailored to fit specific jobs or job categories. This ensures it accurately reflects employee performance and can help improve it.

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