Essential KPI for Remote Teams: Employee Health Index

Managing a remote team is challenging, even in the best of times. In our current environment, it is employee kpi really tough to keep the team engaged, focused and contributing to the company’s ability to survive and thrive.

Frequent check-ins are critical. Having 1:1 meetings with your team members, team huddles, and weekly meetings will help keep you on track. You need talk time with your team, and they need to hear from you often. This generates a lot of meetings, and for a team leader who is talking to a lot of different people all day long, it can be hard to keep track of the information you are gleaning from various team members.

In addition to these important checkpoints, you may want to institute a simple tool to help you gauge how your team is feeling more holistically. Performance is only part of the picture. Even if you have a dashboard to monitor the results your team is getting, you need a leading indicator to let you know when your team is overloaded since that puts them at risk of not achieving their goals.

Our team has used a simple KPI for years to help ensure team members are feeling strong and healthy. It’s a great tool for remote teams to have visibility into each other’s workload and bandwidth, and it’s fantastic for team leaders to be able to pinpoint who needs help before it begins negatively impacting the team’s performance.

The simple KPI is called the Employee Health Index. Each person in our company has a KPI set up like this:

Each week, we all update the status of this KPI to indicate if we are in need of additional projects to stay busy and productive (Bring it on!) or if we are overloaded at the moment. We add comments to explain the story behind the status, which our team members can read and reply to offer help. Team members share if they have too many work projects to manage successfully or if they have a family obligation such a sick parent or child that has them feeling overwhelmed and in need of support from the team.

As a team leader, you can drill down and see where the Reds and Yellows are—be sure to connect with those team members this week:

Giving your team members permission to raise their hands when they need help and being vulnerable when you need help from your team is a great way to build trust and encourage your team members to support each other. This is a simple and essential tool to help you pinpoint who needs help and who may have the ability to step up and take something off that person’s plate.