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Are you serious about delivering results?

By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics

“If you are not measuring it, you are telling people that you are not serious about delivering it.” When I heard this quote at a conference it sent a ripple of unrest and shuffling through the audience and a lively debate ensued. What are you actually measuring in your business? What are you doing with the data? Is it creating the behaviours and results you want?

Measurement can be a double-edged sword, get it right and you will have razor sharp information that drives success, get it wrong and you can cause unintended harm.

Cash continues to be very tight and businesses need to be relentless about improving efficiency, so many are now beginning to focus more on measurement. But there is a real need for caution. Consider the words of the management guru Peter Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently, that which should not be done at all”.

Unintended consequences

You also need to consider the unintended consequences of measures that create unwanted behaviours. For example; we have all, at some time, suffered at the hands of the major businesses that thought they were being smart by reducing costs with outsourced call-centre staff. Over the last decade call centres have become a commodity competing purely on price. If you have ever been passed around from pillar to post, or you were even cut off along the way it was probably due to the type of measures being used. If staff are being measured on average number of calls, that number becomes more important than the call itself. By making the call centre staff into a commodity that can be measured on the volume of calls, average waiting time, average call length, etc. it should be no surprise that they start treating customers like a commodity as well.

Be clear about what you want

So what are the best things to measure? This is a debate I regularly have with any of my clients who want to implement the CLEAR Framework™. This simple framework is all about motivating people through effective communication and it starts with expressing your vision in a way that staff can understand and engage with. This sets the destination. Then, like on any journey, you need to develop the milestones along the way. Your milestones become your initial measures. However, at this early stage they are often very high-level strategic targets like turnover and profitability, sales conversion rates and productivity and efficiency ratios. Every business needs its own measures that keep track of the vital areas, so Directors can keep their finger on the pulse. Ultimately your measures need to be about at least one of the following:

  • improving quality,
  • reducing errors,
  • increasing quantity or
  • reducing costs.

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