Staff Turnover might be easy and familiar to measure, but it is a very poor way to measure employee engagement. Here are five reasons why. (more…)

Not much has changed over the past 20 years, since the Balanced Scorecard threw a big spotlight on performance measurement. People still don't measure performance well enough, despite all the helpful frameworks that have come into being. Personally, I've noticed that people still have the same old struggles in measuring what matters. What should we really be aiming for in performance measuremen...

Surveys are one of the common methods we use in business to gather data. We have customer surveys, employee surveys, corporate image surveys, and surveys just about anytime we want to collect data from people. And often you'll see these surveys listed in the KPI column in the business plan. BIG MISTAKE! Here's why:

Triangulation is a method of locating a point using information about its relationship to two or three known points. It's applied in social sciences by using two or more methods to check the results of a study. Applying this concept to performance management, we can use multiple measures to triangulate our goals, lessening the...

A problem many of us have is too many measures and, consequently, too much to improve. We need to prioritise, but we somehow don't do it well enough. Here's a method to focus on what really matters most, that has over 116 years of proof that it works.

A typical way to set targets is to calculate a target for the year, and then apportion it to each month in that year. The idea is to keep everyone focused on achieving the target, so increase the likelihood the annual target will be met. But it doesn't work. ...

"You'll get square eyes!" my mother used to warn me when I was a child, and she thought I was watching too much TV. It's not true, but it is true that what we look at most does certainly influence our sight. How is our sight influenced by looking at short-term targets?

In performance improvement, a few important terms are often confused or misused. So, exactly what are benchmarks, baselines, targets and standards? (more…)

Performance measures aren’t doing their best work when you treat them as a tick-and-flick monitoring tool. They are only giving you one angle on performance. Often the insights you need will come from a richer story that needs more characters to give a fuller picture.

Following on from Parts 1 and 2, another of the legacy habits that can sneak surreptitiously into our XmR charts and make them incapable of highlighting the real signals in our performance measures, is relying too much on our eyes and not enough on the rules for detecting signals.