Measurement Missteps

Although I don’t get to do it nearly as much as I used to, one of my favorite parts of my job is helping organizations determine how to create their objectives and KPIs.  My focus is on strategy articulation, not strategy formulation.  While other expensive consultants help organizations figure out where they should go, I use performance management techniques to make sure that everyone goes in the same direction.

As such, I often get asked to help out when employee behavior doesn’t match management direction, even though formal goals and metrics have been set.  In my experience this is often because the wrong metrics are chosen – metrics are based on what data is available or the activities being performed, rather than the outcome that needs to be achieved. Last week’s posting is an example: by using the measure ‘% of best practices posted’ rather than ‘average # of people downloading that individual’s best practices’, the manager unintentionally encouraged his employees to create many short documents rather than ones that would be used by others.

Another good example is my classic Dirty KPIs post in which I showed that an activity metric like ‘# of miles of streets cleaned’ tracks an internal process objective and doesn’t ensure that any streets get cleaned.  On the other hand, an outcome measure such as ‘# complaints about street cleanliness reported every quarter’ represents the customer (citizen) point of view and directly measures one of the objectives for the street cleaning program.

You’ve told me that these stories are useful tools for your own performance management journey. I’ll be blogging more of them and, to make them easier for you to find, I’ve added the tag ‘measurement missteps’.  And, since this is a community site, I encourage you to email me your stories.  I’ll be sure to keep them anonymous.