Finally, the awaited moment is here, the intern your team had been contacting is starting their internship, full of passion to work and discover more about the work life and work environment they are about to be part of.
The next phase would be tracking because before you know it, the intern will start working on his/her assigned project, so why do we track interns? We track interns for two main reasons, FIRST, to make sure that interns are getting the best experience, it would come in the organization’s favor to make sure they’re putting their effort in the right place, reason number TWO, tracking keeps you on track, obviously, however, if you are tracking your interns you might stop a problem before it happens, because you will be aware of everything that is happening to the intern in his work context. Measuring interns’ performance can be tricky, but when it is done right, it comes with benefits to the organization and the interns as well.
“Most of us make advances small and large every single day, but we fail to notice them because we lack a method for acknowledging our progress. This is a huge loss.”
So here are the ultimate five steps guide to tracking progress for your interns:
The 9-box grid
A professional method to measure your intern’s performance to know exactly where your intern currently stands and if they are making the desired progress in their internship or not, the 9-box grid is simply a 3*3 table as shown below, in which you got two variables, performance, and potential.
You got to estimate the intern’s level of performance and potential so that the result is one of the 9 boxes, by applying this method, you will finally have a clear category for each intern.
This method should be done regularly, to be able to identify whether the intern is achieving progress, stands still or declining.
The 360-degree feedback method
As simple as it sounds, the 360-degree feedback is a method in which you ask people from the same team about specific topics, you can ask their manager, colleagues, customers and whomever the intern is dealing with during his internship, this method will provide you with different perspectives of the intern’s performance, in which you will be able to identify their points of strength and weakness.
There is a similar method called the 180-degree feedback, in this method you got to only ask people who have direct contact with the intern, his/her manager, and colleagues, this method could be efficiently used with interns who have back office job description with no client-facing work nature.
Assign a supervisor
It’s so important to keep someone in charge of your interns, someone whose duty is to track them and make sure everything is going smoothly as planned. You can assign more than one intern to one supervisor, but it is not advised to assign more than one supervisor to one intern, because that will lead to miscommunication between your side and the intern’s, in case of feedback for example, the intern will not know whom they should talk to, and you will put extra effort to organize the work between the two supervisors instead of focusing on the intern’s experience.
Calendar a weekly call
To be able to see the whole picture, you should first start gathering the small parts together, right? What does that mean? It means being able to have a clear analysis of your intern’s performance at the end of the internship, you should gather weekly input during the whole duration. Touchpoints are a must, a touch point in which you ask the intern for a proper feedback of the key learnings of the week, what he had added to the place, how did he team up with his colleges, his KPIs for the week [Planned vs achieved], and finally his expectations for next week.
The Graphic rating scale
A typical, well-known method in which it has sequential numbers representing the level of what you’re asking about, for example, on a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate the intern’s creativity level?
This method could be represented in numbers, or by words, like often, frequently, never and always, in which you give certain options for the people to choose from, making this method the easiest and fastest to use and that is the reason behind its popularity.
Conclusion:
If you followed the five steps mentioned above, your report is ready to go, the most important thing in tracking the intern’s performance is to keep it organized, you can’t track without being organized, make sure that you have a proper data entry system, in which you are aware of the start date of the internship, weekly meeting checkpoints, location of internship, weekly feedback from each intern and what is the main learning outcomes
Make sure that you have a backup of your data, waking up to losing your data is not a pleasant thing, trust me, I have been there.
Don’t just collect data, collect inputs that will help you create a professional report about your intern to help them develop their skills and here are some skills, your intern needs, to generate the outcome expected from them.
Find the best intern ready to relocate to your country here.
Reference: https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/employee-performance-metrics/
https://www.thehartford.com/business-playbook/in-depth/measuring-evaluating-employee-performance-data
5 easy ways to track your progress every single day (and why it’s so important)
