Defining KPIs - Engage Your Staff!
I am often asked by executives to help them define, or redefine, the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their organization. The mere fact that they want to do this at all is a great sign. Bravo! It means they want to use real data to measure their effectiveness and act as a catalyst for improving. How do you go about defining the most appropriate, high-value KPIs for your organization? The answer: it depends. For a service organization, KPIs should align to the organization’s goals and ultimately be linked to actions that improve customer satisfaction. The frequent mistake that managers make in defining KPIs is to exclude the very people they are measuring from participating in the process. One tool to tap the collective wisdom of your customer-facing staff is to present a list of KPI candidates to your staff and then use a multi-voting process that prioritizes the list. This is sometimes called NGT (Nominal Group Technique) Voting or Sticky-Dot Voting. This technique allows a person to vote multiple times (within limits) for the same selection (KPI) if they have a high certainty factor about that selection.
The advantages of using an approach like this when defining your KPIs are:
- Staff participation and buy-in
- Process transparency
- Obtaining valuable input from good performers who are less vocal than others
- Ensuring that the KPIs are fair and don’t penalize staff members for things they cannot control
You might be thinking, hey, this is a business not a democracy, but remember: if you unilaterally dictate what the organization’s KPIs are without participation from your staff then you have missed one of the greatest opportunities to collectively define accountability and engage your team. Once KPIs have been defined, the targets for those KPIs will have to be set. I’ll talk about a way to do that in the next measurment article.
