It’s first of the year in the business world, and we all know what that means — new management goals and metrics.
And if other companies are any indication, the results are sometimes inconsistent. Some are good, but others are terribly designed, ill-defined, or utterly confusing.
When the situation arises, your choice is to simply live with it, or if possible change them into something more useful.
The specifics vary, but usually bad metrics rear their heads in one of three ways:
- The real bottom-line result isn’t defined.
- The time expectations are wrong.
- Trying to track everything, ultimately forcing employees to pick and choose which battles are “winnable.”
The concept is simple–if you want to change employee behavior, the metrics have to incentivize the change. Whether good or bad, when you change the definition of your metric, tactical and strategic approaches change with it.
The majority of the time if the metric is producing the wrong results, it’s because it wasn’t built to get them.
Even if the measurement seems to be correct, the time frame for getting the results is completely off.
For example, daily goal metrics shifts employee focus to the immediate, and away from the long-term. If you change the metrics to a longer-term agenda — weekly or monthly — it allows them the chance to adapt their processes, because they’re not being “punished” for missing daily metrics.
There’s no right or wrong answer here, just understand that the time frame affects employee processes.
In the face of a deadline, it’s easy to forget that an employee’s time is limited. There’s realistically only so many tasks they will be able to get done in the time they have at work.
After a while, creating metrics no longer adds value; it merely drives people to get rid of activities to meet their highest priorities.
There’s no rule for setting what the limit is, just understand that your people are going to start “gaming the system” if they don’t have any other choice.