It’s not as easy as you think
When you hire people, you expect them to produce some output. The output is the most important part of any function you have people perform. So it makes sense you’d want to measure the output to see how people are doing. But that’s not always so simple.
Some Outputs are Numeric
That’s fine. These are often easy to measure. But resist the temptation to measure something just because it’s easy. You could end up measuring something that’s not exactly what you want. For example, let’s say you run a call center. Customers or prospects call in to get their questions answered or their problems solved. It’s easy to measure calls per hour for each employee. And that seems good because a higher number means your costs are lower.
Opposing Metrics Are Often Useful
But you don’t want your people hanging up on callers as soon as they can. You also want those callers to be well served at the end of the call. This is harder to measure. But you must try. You can ask callers to fill out a survey. It might not be exact but if you keep it short and simple, it might give you some insight.
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Short & simple is why these kiosks can work. If you survey by other means (say email) I recommend only that same single question. If you insist, add only one other question WHY? And let people write. You’ll learn more that way.
With opposing metrics, one will tell you who’s doing a good job and who’s doing a bad one. Pair that with an opposing metric of who’s doing a fast job and you’ll get a better insight into what’s really happening.
Sometimes You Have to Get Creative
I know of a staffing company which provided truck drivers for temporary assignments matching up the customer’s needs with drivers who had the proper licenses and certifications required. Their dilemma was how to incentivize their sales people to open new accounts as well as continue to sell to existing accounts. The skills were similar but the effort for each kind of customer was different – as was the profit to the company. So measuring these was a form of opposing metrics since time spent on one type of account was time not spent on the other.
If they set different commission rates for each, the sales people would ignore the lower rated one and focus only on the other. What they came up with was this. Each sales person was given two quotas – one for existing accounts and one for new accounts. Only the new accounts earned a commission but that commission was not paid unless the quota on the existing accounts was met.
How to Measure a Quality
Numeric measurements are easy compared to qualitative measures but sometimes you really need a qualitative measurement. So how do you measure a quality?
Can a Quality be Turned into a Number?
A lawyer client had a problem that an associate was producing low quality work and they couldn’t tell if it was lack of training in an aspect of the law or simple sloppiness. I suggested rather than just correct the errors, they categorize them so they could see where additional training was needed. Then track the number of errors in different categories so they could see improvement if the training was effective. This turned a qualitative output (poor work) into numbers they could track and improve.
Define the Quality In Visible Ways
But sometimes you can’t turn a quality into a number. That’s because humans are good at making snap judgements. This can be a superpower until it’s a problem. And the words we use to describe those judgments sometimes have different definitions for different people. Words like leadership, teamwork, even responsibility can mean different things to different people. But often those qualities are the outputs we want to measure.
That’s why it’s important to dig beneath our initial judgement and describe the quality in terms of behaviors – what we can see and hear. What do you see or hear when there’s teamwork for example? Probably things like people helping others and people asking for help; folks giving recognition and praise to others. Those are the behaviors we associate with teamwork. Leadership has behaviors of constantly sharing a vision in a way that relates to the work people do and inspires people to follow them. Innovation is measured in some organizations by the number of patents they are awarded. It could also be indicated by the behaviors of coming up with new ideas or inventions and novel ways to solve problems.
Measuring qualities isn’t as cut and dried as measuring numeric outputs but is sometimes more important. Even when you define behaviors, there might still be some subjectivity in your measurement of those outputs but it’s way better than using a quality that can mean different things to different people.
So it’s worth putting in the effort to describe the conduct you want to see.
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