Metrics_ How to Improve Key Business Results - Martin Klubeck [73]
Incentive Programs Based on Measures
The last misstep I'll cover is building incentives around measures. Again, as with stretch goals and using measures of success as the goal—the emphasis (and reward) is placed on the wrong thing. There was an Olympic weight lifter who was given a large monetary reward for every weight-lifting record he broke. Not surprisingly, he broke his own world records incrementally—with the smallest increase in weight allowed to count as a new record. He was able to break world records many times. This was probably not exactly what the establishment was trying to motivate with their incentive program. But since the measure was the focus, rather than the goal, the results were naturally off center.
More enterprises than you can imagine have gone out of business due to misplaced focus. This absence of focus includes forgetting who the customer is, forgetting why the organization exists, and forgetting the goals of the organization. Focusing on individual acclaim rather than organizational success, on incentives rather than overall excellence, on measures instead of the goals, and on thresholds, targets, and incentives around measures—are misaligned with what is important.
Expectations
The use of expectations is not a conceptual or theoretical breakthrough. It is not a silver bullet. It, too, can be abused and misused.
Expectations help you stay focused on what is important. They provide the ultimate context for your metrics—based fully on the customers' point of view.
Expectations provide the ultimate context for your metrics—based fully on the customers' point of view.
Expectations are a clear description of what the customer expects from your service or product. Of course, you can use expectations for any of the views in the Answer Key, but we're focused on effectiveness, so we'll stick to the first quadrant.
The following are the questions that you will ask:
What level of service does the customer expect?
What is the quality of product that the customer expects?
Will exceeding these expectations benefit the organization?
Will failing to meet these expectations hurt the organization?
Why does the customer have these expectations?
With expectations, we start with the assumption that the customer has a range of expectations that you will provide. Let's look at the service center/help desk again as an example.
When a customer calls the service center seeking advice, he has some general expectations. For example, when I buy a product online and consequently need to get help from a service center, my expectations are rather low. My first expectation is that I won't be able to easily find a phone number to call on the company's web site. I am rarely disappointed—it seems not matter what link, icon, or button I select, I am given more opportunities to buy something. After a diligent search and more keystrokes (and clicks) than I want to count, I find the phone number. After dialing it, I expect that I won't get to speak to a living person until I spend at least five minutes navigating the auto-response call system. Of all the choices provided, (1 for new service, 2 for extending your service, 3 for adding a service, etc.) none of them will be, “speak to a service representative.” So, without listening to all the choices, I press 0. Then, I get the “sorry that is an invalid choice, please try again.” So I press 0 again and before the same recording can apologize for my mistake again, I press zero once more and, yes, I finally get a living, breathing representative to answer my call!
Now, my expectations change: how long it will take for a technician to actually engage me in conversation? Once I've explained my problem to the technician, how long will it take him to assist me? How well will the technician's solution work? These are all expectations that will help the organization define the measures used for performance.
If you're measuring