Staff performance not always made to measure

If organisations take performance seriously they need to know how their business is performing, not just guess.

Stacey Barr is the author of Prove It! How to Create a High-Performance Culture and Measurable Success.

If organisations take performance and success seriously they need to know how their business is performing, not just guess or assume. And that means measuring.

Too many think measuring performance means measuring staff. They believe that when staff are measured they perform better. And when staff perform better, the business performs better.

But there’s a flaw in this logic: measuring staff performance does not improve business performance. It often worsens it.

That’s not to say staff performance should not be evaluated and improved, and it’s not to say staff can’t be accountable for business results. What’s needed is a new logic about the relationship between staff and results.

How performance measurement and improvement is practised has a direct impact on the culture that emerges. Using key performance indicators and measures actively prevents a high-performance culture because it directs staff attention to self-preservation, not to creativity, innovation and collaboration.

In Measurement Madness, Dina Gray and others note how often “people focus on the measure at the expense of the real objectives of the organisation”. This results in gaming the measure through data manipulation, or gaming work practices to hit targets. Delivery drivers deliberately fail to deliver goods on the first attempt because the KPI they are rewarded for is the number of attempts to deliver.

If organisations want a true high-performance culture, they need a fundamental shift in the relationship between measures and people and in their definition of accountability. When accountability is framed to drive the right behaviour, it can create a high-performance culture. And it’s what, specifically, people are held accountable for that must change.

Rather than holding people accountable for hitting targets, leaders and managers should hold them accountable for three things.

The first is directly measuring and monitoring the important results they are responsible for. If a person or team is responsible for how quickly customer problems are resolved, they would be accountable for measuring the time it took to resolve the problems.

The second is validly interpreting the measures of the results they are responsible for. Rather than focusing only on each problem individually, they would look for patterns across time in how long it took to resolve customer problems. Valid insights and conclusions come from proper data analysis, not knee-jerk reactions to single data points.

The third behaviour is initiating action. If their measure shows a result they are responsible for isn’t improving, it’s up to them to improve it. If their measure shows actual performance isn’t close enough to target, it’s up to them to close the gap. And this action will almost always involve putting together the right team to collaborate on testing and choosing the best solution.

KPIs or performance measures play a central role in this accountability model, but it’s fundamentally different to the old model. Rather than monitoring staff performance, measures are used to monitor process results and diagnose how to elevate process performance. Staff can then embrace accountability as problem solving, not judgment or blame.

This model — monitoring, interpreting and improving results — drives behaviours geared toward improving business performance, rather than hiding problems to avoid blame. This promotes a culture of ownership, collaboration and continuous improvement. Transparency will increase and performance improve.

Stacey Barr is the author of Prove It! How to Create a High-Performance Culture and Measurable Success.