Key Performance Indicators & Job Descriptions

by Daria Kelly Uhlig Google

Your employees' success depends on how well they understand their job responsibilities and the specific tasks their jobs entail. A job description provides this information. A well-crafted job description communicates your expectations to job candidates and serves as a manual for hiring the best person for the job. After the candidate has been hired, the description becomes an assessment tool that helps you measure the employee's performance against the stated job requirements. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are measurable outcomes tied to specific tasks the job description lists.

Purpose of Key Performance Indicators

Key performance indicators should reflect and support your company's strategic objectives and the factors that drive success. In other words, they're larger than the employee and the employee's job description. If one of your objectives is to expand into new markets, your marketing staff would be tasked with researching possible markets to target. The key performance indicators for this task might be the identification of a specific number of new markets and a marketing plan for each. These key performance indicators have a direct and measurable impact on the company's expansion goal. They also specify the performance standards employees are expected to achieve.

Where Key Performance Indicators Fit In

PTG Global acknowledges two main components in job descriptions: the job and the competencies required to do the job. Within the job section are key result areas, or KRAs, comprising groups of related tasks that explain the purpose of the job. A key result area for a retail clerk might be upselling to customers as they approach the cash register. Tasks associated with upselling might include promoting opt-ins to a loyalty program. The key performance indicator for that task might specify that the employee is responsible for increasing loyalty program membership. This key performance indicator would, in turn, support an overall objective to increase sales.

Creating Job Descriptions

If your company is writing job descriptions for the first time, an analysis of existing positions is a logical starting point. The New South Wales Government Small Business site suggests listing your staff members as well as all the tasks and roles within your business. Match the tasks and roles to the staff members. The result is a rudimentary job description you can flesh out with key performance indicators. Use the completed descriptions as templates for descriptions of future jobs. However, be flexible. Each employee carries out a job a little differently and so changes the job to some degree. Incorporate these changes and the key performance indicators that measure their outcomes in the new descriptions. Changes to a description, including key performance indicators, are also necessary when the company establishes new goals, so that the description always aligns with current objectives.

Additional Uses for Job Descriptions

Companies use job descriptions as a basis for a range of operational and human resource decisions beyond hiring employees and evaluating individual performance. As PTG Global notes, descriptions also assist you in setting salaries and incentives, identifying training needs, creating succession plans and eliminating ineffective staff.

About the Author


Photo Credits

  • Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images
Suggest an Article Correction