Making Performance Measurable and Comparable

The right differentiation as a foundation

The key, therefore, is a clear differentiation: Which hours are billable? Which ones feed into the company as performance time? And how are these hours distributed across specific service positions? Only once these questions have been clearly answered does a reliable basis for assessing performance emerge.

Because the central question is: How can I measure the performance of my employees fairly and transparently?

Overview of performance evaluation tools

Various methods are available for evaluating performance: analysis of billed hours, pure revenue, the billing ratio, or individually defined KPIs based on time tracking. Performance time – i.e., productive working time regardless of its billability – can also be used as a separate metric.

Another key instrument is the target value: an employee pursues a defined goal – for example, a revenue target – which is set as an expected figure for a specific period.

In practice, however, a challenge arises: if performance is measured solely by invoice value, external factors such as customer discounts or project-specific pricing structures influence the result. The actual effort remains the same, but the evaluation turns out differently.

Extended target value analysis with actuarial assessment

This is where the extension of the target value analysis comes in. In addition to revenue targets, purely actuarial values can now also be used – for example, based on an employee’s external hourly rate. This makes it possible to neutralise scale effects and further increase comparability between employees without replacing existing evaluation models. On this basis, not only transparency about performance developments is created, but also an objective foundation for incentive and remuneration models – for example in the form of bonus or commission systems.