More KPIs create confusion in the minds of your employees.
Many sports coaches will give a lot of information to their players in a time out, but they hold back the most important pieces until the end. Players will typically only remember the last thing they hear. The same is true when it comes to your employees. Having a lot of targets to hit in a given year can lead to frustration trying to understand what goal is most important, and balancing all of them with the company goals seems nearly impossible.
In reality, only three solid key performance indicators (KPIs) can be enough to ensure your teams are on track and that your department is driving for the right results. Evaluations can then take the KPIs into account and give your employees solid and useful feedback. It also makes it much easier to align your staff with your department goals, and align both with the company’s mission.
KPIs give you measurable standards that help with understanding exactly how your staff contributes. For example, if your company is in the business of providing customer service, you can set a KPI that will evaluate exactly how your team responds to customer inquiries, and if any are unresolved after a given time. What you should not base your standards on is the number of inquiries received. Things like servers going offline can impact your customers’ abilities to reach you.
Setting just a handful of useful KPIs allows you to measure the effectiveness of the year’s goals. They give you metrics that let you analyze the results you achieve based on the goals you set. That direct line means you are much more likely to reach the goal you set because of the lack of complications. You should also look at drivers when developing your KPIs to be able to best monitor current – and future – measures.
Keeping the number of KPIs down also allows you to directly and easily measure your employees’ goals and how successful they are at meeting them. Set a KPI for each goal and then examine what the strategy is for reaching that goal. When you and your employee understand the framework of the organization and what it will take to reach the goal, everything becomes much clearer and your employee will feel more of a purpose.
This is important because being able to understand how they fit into the big picture of the company gives employees meaning in the workplace and their job satisfaction is typically much higher. Having clear matrices on what is evaluated also means you can turn poor performance around easier and you can reward great performance, a factor that also leads to much higher job satisfaction.
Whatever KPIs you choose, you should keep a few things in mind. They should be easy to comprehend and follow, they should link to the goals of the organization, and they need to be specifically measurable. You should also make sure that the intermediary assessments are not spaced too far apart and that the data acquired during the reviews is something actionable.
By focusing on just the most important factors to the organization, your three key KPIs let everyone work towards the same objective, assess tendencies and possible roadblocks, and achieve a strong outcome.