If you don't take care in naming your performance measures, you end up with problems like different measures having the same name, the same measure having different names, and people getting confused about what the measure is about. That's messy. So don't take naming your measures too lightly.

With a new calendar year just around the corner, you might be thinking about New Year's Resolutions. These are goals just like any other: if you're serious about achieving them, you must measure them...

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…)