What are Key Result Areas?

Key Result Areas, popularly known as KRAs, are measurable indicators of an employee’s performance in context of business operations and are used to track progress. KRAs have been integral to the performance evaluation process for years. This concept helps employers track performance traditionally or on a performance management system.

HR managers and employers are interested in improving their business’s performance and efficiency but can face issues when it comes to measuring them objectively. That’s where KRAs come in.

How do KRAs work?

KRAs refer to the general measurements or parameters that a company has set for a particular position. The word describes the span of a job profile and encompasses around 80% of a job’s responsibilities.

When an employee’s performance is evaluated through key result areas, it helps them have a clearer understanding of their function. That’s why KRAs should be well-defined, quantitative, and straightforward to track. This also helps employees align their roles in the company.

In a manner that resembles organized chaos, these key result areas are produced by corporations and organizations to evaluate the performance of their employees. Employers also use KRAs as an evaluation tool since they focus on all aspects of an employee’s work life, not just one job duty.

Importance of having Key Result Areas

KRAs can serve many functions. They can summarize an employee’s role in an organization, and they can motivate employees and increase their engagement.

When KRAs match the tasks that have been accomplished, they become indisputably fair and unbiased to appraise, reward, and recognize employees. Deadlines and timelines are like the backbone of a project plan; they keep tasks organized, allow you to prioritize, and help you meet all due dates.

When an organization clearly defines the roles and responsibilities of each department and employee, time, budget, and assets are much easier to allocate.

A supervisor’s job is not just to assign tasks and check in on results; it’s also to help employees understand how their role fits into the big picture.

When employees know what they are supposed to do and accomplish, they are likelier to produce better results with increased productivity.

Benefits of KRA

Knowing what you are responsible for is essential to your job satisfaction, productivity, and professional growth. KRAs are instrumental in:

• Linking each job role to the overall business strategy.
• Achieving organizational alignment, top-down communication must be balanced with bottom-up participation.
• Setting clear goals for employees to be efficient.
• Evaluating performances fairly.
• Providing feedback tailored to an employee’s requirements.

Tips for Setting KRA

If you want to assign key result areas and make sure employees can maximize the efficiency of your organization, here are five simple tips:

1. For key result areas to be effective, they have to be tailored to each employee’s particular strengths and expertise. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to setting it. Remember that feedback from colleagues, managers, and most importantly, the employees themselves should be taken into account while setting up their KRAs.
2. Measuring how organized an organization is and how much it helps its employees grow is essential. That’s why, having a healthy balance between short-term and long-term goals as well as between an employee’s career objectives and an organization’s mission will help you define KRAs.
3. Evaluate employees regularly and give them plenty of notice when reviews are coming up. Measure their performance against the criteria you set (both qualitative and quantitative). Try setting goals and evaluating overall performance.
4. The best way to assign responsibilities is to give multiple goals to employees. Multiple priorities for KRAs, on the other hand, will help employees accomplish tasks faster, leading to better performance reviews and timely completion of tasks.
5. Flexible, realistic key results areas are essential to make a business thrive. Unyielding and inflexible key results areas won’t take enterprises anywhere, so keeping them up with changing times is important.

How to calculate KRA?

Key result areas are used by many businesses to measure and account for how well their employees are doing. While it is weighed according to their importance, all weights added together must equal 100%. Each KRA has quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs) that track how well your organization is doing.

Methods to write smart KRAs

Here are some steps you can follow to write effective KRAs:

1. It is essential to check an employee’s job description before they are assigned with their KRAs. Meet with both the manager and employee, if necessary.
2. It’s important to understand what an individual can do for you before handing them targets to reach.
3. Remember to complete all tasks stated in percentages and figures to measure progress quantitatively.
4. Instead of creating your targets and explanations in a vacuum, build up your mechanisms from the ground up. Imagine how a complete newbie stumbling would try to figure it out and design your concepts accordingly.
5. When setting goals, include concrete, reachable targets, and reasonable deadlines.

Things to remember before assigning KRA

To achieve goals smoothly in a channelized manner, it is necessary to assign key result areas (KRAs) to employees according to their positions in an organization. However, while assigning the KRAs, it is advisable to follow three steps:

1. Maintaining clear communication: Organizations are like ships, and their missions are their courses. Defining a successful practice requires knowing where the boat is going, where it has been, where it is now, and who’s on board. Get your employees on the same page by aligning goals with your organization’s mission.
2. Checking in with employees: To ensure the success of key result areas efforts, managers should talk to those involved and ask for their input. The only way to learn about employees’ strengths and weaknesses is to communicate with them. This way, managers will be able to delegate responsibilities effectively.
3. Concise instructions: When establishing key results areas, supervisors need to clearly grasp what they expect from each employee and how each of the expectations align with the organization’s goals. Once you create a step-by-step method for completing goals, employees can easily accomplish their objectives without confusion.

Summing up

When you link SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) to job descriptions and the organization’s key result areas, you help employees align their work to organizational needs. Defining a job’s duties as precisely as possible helps managers set goals that match employees’ skills and the company’s needs.