Are Metrics, Scorecards, and Dashboards Killing Your Company?
Numbers can be a good way to measure employee performance. Sometimes.
Want to know if a customer service employee effectively resolves complaints that arise? Number of calls answered, call duration, and a satisfaction rating may give you part of the picture. But none of those numbers would tell you that John over in Customer Care tends to get impatient with elderly callers and cut those calls short.
Is our near-obsession with quantifying every aspect of employee performance a good thing? The Harvard Business Review warns that an over-reliance on metrics could be damaging your business. It's easier to manage numbers than people, writes contributor Adrian Ott -- and that tendency could mean that you're not investing enough in really knowing how your employees work and make mistakes.
Consider the recent black eye that Delta Air Lines received by charging excess baggage fees to 32 Army troops returning from Afghanistan. As you may recall, their military orders stated that their baggage costs were covered, but Delta personnel disagreed, charging each soldier $200 out of his own pocket. It wasn't until two soldiers took their story to the Web with a YouTube video that Delta reimbursed the troops.
Obviously, Delta's tone-deaf adherence to policy was clearly damaging to their brand. Anyone could have seen that -- from top management all the way down to the line-level counter workers who handled the soldiers. So why didn't anyone do anything until after the news went viral on YouTube?
Ott says it's just a sign that top-down metrics imposed by Delta's management both restricts the flexibility of employees who interact with the customer and also saps their creativity, innovation, and desire to excel. As a recent Mercer study demonstrates, half of all employees are emotionally and intellectually divested from their job.
That doesn't mean that you should throw away all the rules and guidelines that help your managers and employees get their jobs done. But stories like this one are vivid reminders that you can't run a business with a metrics dashboard like you might drive a car -- you need to back away from the numbers and give people the flexibility they need to not just do their job, but to find ways to excel at it.
Photo courtesy Flickr user Dawn Hopkins
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