Businesses want employees that are loyal and give it their all. They want their employees to work as a team.
In these hard economic times, most businesses drive their decisions solely on the company’s bottom line – finance. Managers’ performances are measured based on efficiencies, on-time, on-budget and profitability. Look at the General Motor’s ignition fiscal, the part cost only an extra $2. Looking back, they probably wished they had waited that extra little bit instead of pushing ahead.
Value statements about teamwork, synergy and all those corporate values won’t go anywhere when there are weekly/monthly layoffs and everyone struggling to keep their jobs. Your corporate message becomes a joke when employees see daily decisions that contradicts “corporate values” – action speak louder than words. When a company’s share value is determined by its quarterly result and a CEO’s pay is based stock price, guess how that affects the decision process.
Measurement affects behavior. I remember the days when I was programming that the number of lines of code you write is one of the “productivity measure”. So instead of sharing / reusing code, people simply replicate the code which makes boost up the lines-of-code count but make subsequent maintenance difficult. Since the developer is not measured by how easy it is to maintain and make changes later, it is easy pass the problem till later and will ultimately cost more. But realistically, who cares when one don’t even know if they can survive the day.
I am not naive enough to think that businesses can survive in a vacuum -if they don’t make money, then they won’t survive and there will be no jobs. However, finding good and relevant measure is a key to fostering growth towards the right direction.
Exercise
Complete these sentences to show how having the wrong measurement can steer you off course and yet relevant under a certain context:
– If size of muscle is the measurement for power, then…
– If looseness is the measurement for effectiveness, then …
– If a university degree is a measurement for your ability, then …