Key Purrformance Indicators

Today HAAR would like to discuss the annual hunger games that are the definition, application and outcome of 'key performance indicators' within organisations.

Do they actually realise their intended outcomes by providing direction, motivation and truly achievable and rewardable performance goals for staff - or are they largely white noise imposts driven by arbitrary measures pushed by Management which merely encourage negative competitive cultures, facilitated by burdensome line management structures, who ultimately bell-curve employee expectations and outcomes? Let us explore and pontificate!

Originally intended to give previously loyal and happy employees newfound purpose and lofty 'goals' to reach, KPI's have frequently become frustrating exercises in determining new ways of writing 'what you do' with some generally dictated value you'll need to meet in a specified period of time - often without the person having any real control over that outcome or reward.

KPI's have also morphed into tools to drive organisational check box compliance and wider 'behaviours' which essentially imply that people are unable to be 'adults' without instruction on how to do so. Surely saying something like 'be nice to your workmates and customers', and 'if you don't comply, then good bye!' would be a simpler and easier way of addressing that?

Add to this the explosion of people writing perceived 'value add' tasks into their KPI's with the intention of improving their place on the bell curve. Unfortunately and inadvertently these largely end up with multiple people duplicating each others actions (and/or occasionally jobs) as they compete to show their magical 'added value' and importance. This often results in the perpetration and duplication of unnecessary work and further cottage industries that try to solve their version of an issue, rather than the organisation actually addressing the true problem root cause methodically and holistically.

The other challenge with the implementation of KPI's across organisation is the associated overhead of managing these measures, both from a people and technology perspective. Internal siloed industries are spawned to ensure people complete and review their KPIs against forced milestones and metrics so they can be 'assessed' at the end of the year, often with little real involvement of the person under review. This unfortunately applies a standardised approach which assumes everyone needs / wants to be measured to be rewarded, and doesn't allow for people blissfully happy doing what they do in their jobs. Additionally when you add the cost of systems, processes and integration required to manage KPI's, the true value has to be questioned.

Are all KPIs bad? No, certainly at the Executive levels where performance can easily be measured by big numbers, they work well. However, these folks generally get paid significant amounts of money regardless of the outcome, unlike Sal* the factory foreman who didn't meet his widget crystal ball target this year and now struggles to pay his rent. However, KPI's should be targeted at the people who actually have true control over their outcomes, not the people at the work front who lack the negotiation power before, during and after the assessment and reward process.

So what's an alternative? One model could be to move from a KPI based performance model to one paying market rates against people's core role, without underlying expectations of having to do more than your job to receive a full pay. Bonus's can then be paid to people against set 'Do this, get that' criteria for work or initiatives that genuinely benefit the organisation - not someone else's KPI's up the tree. True KPI's can then by targeted at the senior levels against business focused outcomes where people have the true ability to negotiate and determine their rewards. The current line management overhead can then be reduced to minimal people care, and their excess capacity redeployed to true business focused outcomes. The diagrams below were added for colour only, any relationship to the paragraph above is purely coincidently...

In summary, performance measures are like cats on the couch. They can be purring along and playing nice one minute, however clawing the the hands that feed them when you ask them to move...

HAAR: Thought provoking critical thinking, without much thought.

Let us know what you think in the comments below! We need at least 5 to meet our Thubanian KPI's by the end of this year, Professor Katz says so...

#flowToAwesome / *#futuramaReference / #HAARminals