Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [111]
Reward and Recognition
People want to be noticed. People want to be rewarded. Actually, all creatures like positive attention. It makes you feel good. This is one of the best ways to improve organization health, but it's also one of the hardest to do right. The problem is that you have to get it right. As described earlier—if you reward the wrong people or for the wrong things, your efforts will backfire. You have to ensure before you hand out rewards that the recipients are the right people and have done the right things. This requires more than putting a “recognition program” in place. It requires more than setting up a system for employees to nominate each other for recognition or rewards. It requires earnest interest in what the workforce is doing and who is really making positive things happen.
There are more ways to mess up than to succeed, as follows:
The Shotgun. Rewarding everyone in a blanket method doesn't work. “You are all such great workers that I'm giving the entire organization a day off!” There is a problem if everyone isn't really doing great work. The workers know who is a good worker and who isn't. The shotgun approach tells the workforce that You don't know them
You don't care to get to know them
The Elective Process. If you institute a program where people can submit others for rewards and an administrator sifts through the submissions to determine winners, you are going to create a system that is more of a game than a tool for rewards and recognition. The workers will either ignore the system or see how many rewards you can be made to give to the wrong people. The problems are simple in the workforce's eyes: Leadership and management should care enough to know when a worker deserves praise
You're asking the employees to do management's job for them
Believe it or not, most deserving workers will feel embarrassed to nominate themselves, so they will feel even more slighted that you are forcing them to do so or get someone else to nominate them—again, it should be management's job to notice.
The Halo and Horns Effect. Workers already believe that there are “favorites.” When you institute a program that continues to reward those believed favorites, even when they haven't done anything “lately,” and continues to ignore the good works someone who hasn't been in the limelight in the past performs—the workforce is reassured that the wealthy become wealthier and the poor become poorer.
Of course, you can attempt to base your rewards and recognition on performance measures, but that has its own set of problems—including encouraging “chasing data.” In the end, these issues are only important in as much as they affect the metrics you will develop and use to determine your organization health.
Measuring Organization Health
Understanding the underlying viewpoint of the workforce will help you properly design metrics for this quadrant. When you look at each of the measures, you have to keep the possible issues and missteps in mind.
Employee Satisfaction Measures
No surprises here. You'll have to include the task of asking the employees how they feel. But besides gathering the subjective responses to interview or survey questions, we'll still lean on triangulation to gather other measures. We'll want some objective measures like retention and turnover. We'll want to know the number of types of grievances logged. The rules of creating good metrics haven't changed—just the focus.
Training
Training measures should include skill levels, changes in skill levels, and the amount and quality of training received. You can also have maturity-based questions like:
Do employees have training plans?
Is there a professional development program used?
How often are skill levels assessed?
Is there a cross-training program in place?
But other simple measures also work, and include the following:
The number of training hours