Background
From business development teams to production and delivery teams, how do you ensure that your team is performing at its best? This question has been asked by every organization, and the same has been addressed many times over in a manner that is unique to such an organization.
PROBLEM / OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT
Often times, businesses are unable to pinpoint the bottlenecks in their teams' performance, and though there is the lingering sense that it can improve, it is never clearly identified as to what aspects will help with improving the performance.
CRITICAL CONSTRAINTS
The process of identifying and implementing performance measurement systems takes only a few weeks; however, the course correction process following findings and change process implementation can take months, and steady and continuous monitoring of the metrics system requirements can take 6 to 9 months on average for the new metrics and benefits to kick in.
KEY OBSERVATIONS
Organizations with overlapping business functions tend to lose out a lot on efficient business operations, and leaders with dependencies on people rather than processes tend to have the widest performance gaps.
SOLUTION
A clear methodology broken down into single-line tasks and routines with clear outcome definition and parallel and independent benchmarking of the task, leaving no room for subjective scoring and being purely data-driven.
APPROACH TO SOLUTION
When dealing with performance reviews, it is best not to have any opinions or subjective judgments on the performance measurement; this allows for unbiased and often undeniable performance scores. To achieve this, a well-articulated, clear statement of tasks and routines and the outcome expected should be created. For example, the marketing team's measurement is the number of qualified leads generated; the sales team's measurement is the amount of revenue generated and the percentage of customers converted; and so on. However, within such an obvious statement of tasks, several sub-tasks can be introduced, which does not give way for assumptions to occur in performance assessment.
KEY SOLUTION METRICS
Provides a clear, statistical metric of organization-wide performance, provides a clear view of bottlenecks that hinder performance and impact it, and benefits employees in accordance.
SOLUTION LIMITATIONS
This is ideal for organizations with at least 50 resources working full time; applying for less than 20 people is not ideal.
PROCESS APPLIED
Performance management and deriving high performance from a team is, by nature and for obvious reasons, a team effort. So the task and routines and the associated outcomes are all developed with the team members, and the data input systems and policy implementations for capturing the performance metrics are also peer-peer managed. This creates a greater acceptance of the findings and makes the process of implementation smoother.
REVENUE IMPACT
High-performing teams impact the topline and bottomline of the organization in a consecutive manner, allowing the company to grow linearly in otherwise normal market conditions. We have seen a 5–6% performance score in marketing functions and over a 300% score in production functions, highlighting through data-driven input how some employees were able to use their interpersonal skills to avoid detection for underperformance and how some employees contributed above and beyond their expected job functions.
AD-HOC CONTRIBUTORS
Employee satisfaction, role reorientation and process driven performance hindrance identification, resolutions becomes more easier. Creates a culture of cooperation and ease of escalation management, conflict resolution.
KEY BENEFITS OF SOLUTION
With a scorecarding system and issue resolution process built in, the employee can freely focus on what it is that they need to do and continue with their performance goals with the ability to showcase their skills and abilities, which weeds out non performing entities, including people, from the system.