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The number of workers received training

The number of employees taking advantage of in-house training

The difference between required skill levels and existing skill levels—and whether it is improving

Training should also include skills. Besides the suggestions already given, you can measure how many of your employees are seen as experts in their field? Do other companies seek them out for advice? Do your peers consider your staff to be experts? Are your workers published? Are they presenting at conferences? Are they encouraged to be recognized as experts?

Work Environment

Again, surveys will work well to determine employee satisfaction levels. But as with employee satisfaction, you should find other means of gathering the measures; hopefully more objective ones. The following are possible measures of the health of the work environment:

Number of sick days and/or vacation days used (extremes in either direction can be an indicator of an unhealthy work environment )

Employee turnover

Laughter in the halls (and if it continues when the boss walks by)

The number of pictures on employee's walls (do your employees make their workspace pleasant for themselves or does it resemble a jail cell?)

Early arrivals, late departures

For all of the examples, the question isn't what's good or bad, but whether you're seeing extremes or anomalies. In either case, they are indicators that there may be issues with the health of your work environment. While negative extremes (high absenteeism rates for example) may be worrisome, any extreme (workers not taking their vacation time) can also be an indicator of problems. Besides extremes, you will need to investigate when anomalies (things out of the established norms for your organization) pop up.

Reward and Recognition

It is important that you know if your people feel valued. Besides measuring if the employees are rightly rewarded and recognized internally, you'll also want to measure if they are being recognized and rewarded by outside institutions. Some questions leadership or management may want to consider include the following:

Are employees doing great things?

How well do you know your workforce?

Do you know what your employees' hobbies and pastimes are?

Do you know if they are winning awards for non-work related efforts?

Are your workers contributing significantly to the community?

If you want to measure the effectiveness of your “reward and recognition” program, you may want to use the employee satisfaction measures. It will be hard to measure the worth of your program without seeing if the workers believe you are doing so properly. You could measure the program itself, including the following:

The number of awards distributed

The number of workers nominated for awards

The number of unique workers recognized each year

These would be the measures I would suggest for an immature organization. The problem with a reward-and-recognition program is that you need one. Funny how we reward and recognize our children without a formal program. Funny how we care enough to pay attention to their successes and failures. Parents know their children's accomplishments because they care about their success. Many times parents feel their children's successes are also theirs.

Too bad managers don't seem to be able to do this, even though there is normally a concerted effort to ensure people don't supervise too many individuals.

For some reason, managers seem unable to pay enough attention to their workers' successes. Conversely, managers seem to know each worker's missteps and mishaps intimately. This may be because errors are elevated to the manager while many times good works go unheralded. I'm not going to try and solve the complexities of trying to implement a reward and recognition program. But I do want to stress that measuring the program will be problematic since you probably don't want to need a program. It would be much better if you had a culture of recognition.

That's something worth measuring.

Future Health

The next quadrant I suggest you tackle