When an organization shifts to a performance driven, metrics based culture, often there is a clash between management and the employees serving customers. Management needs to see quantitative data to make strategic decisions and employees want to ensure that their customers receive high quality service. Adding to the challenge is the fact that employees often misinterpret metrics programs as attempts to squeeze more productivity out of them and steal any fun they are having at work. When management teams are referred to as “they” by employees then this implies that there has already been  a breakdown in trust. Without properly timed leadership and communication, employees think that the message being sent is exclusively about “the numbers” and not about quality delivered to customers or job satisfaction. Quantity and quality discussions should not be approached from an either/or perspective.

Here is the message that must be delivered from management and embraced by employees:

Quality and Quantity are NOT mutually exclusive goals but are in fact linked, aligned, dependent upon on each other and BOTH are absolutely necessary for customer satisfaction.

In my experience, good employees usually take pride in their work. That is, you don’t have to convince them that the quality of the service or product they provide is important. However, employees often need convincing that it is necessary to measure their output (quantity). They make the argument that if they have to increase their output then the quality of what they provide will suffer. There are endless examples of how to counter this argument but here are a couple of examples:

1. A Lamborghini assembly plant turns out a spectacular car. But, they only build 2 cars that year. The quality becomes irrelevant if there are not enough cars produced to stay in business.
2. A call center for patients is empathetic, caring and spends as much time as necessary on every patient. But, turn-around times are long. As a result, 10 calls went to voice mail and were not returned that day. Therefore, the quality of service relevant to those 10 customers, that day, was zero.  Their suffering is prolonged.

Employees need to be involved in the creation of metrics programs and understand them or the measurement program will fail to deliver results and end up looking like a Dilbert cartoon.  Both management and the employees need to work together, as a team, and have a meeting of the minds when it comes to these questions:

1. Why is this program necessary and what is the goal?
2. How will the targets be established?
3. How will these numbers be used on employee performance reviews?
4. Do employees being measured feel that the process is fair relative to how other product groups or departments in the company are measured?
5. What steps will be taken to ensure the integrity and relevance of the measurements, the process and the reports?

Management is responsible for leadership and communication. The employees are responsible for participating and contributing to the program.  The goal should be to elevate the level of service to customers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Service Best Practices, Measuring Service, Accountability in Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.