Running the Show With Employee Metrics

As a small to medium-sized business owner, it’s easy to get caught up in running the show. After all, that’s how your business started, right? At some point or another, though, the question will surface, “how did I end up doing everything?”

So you hire employees and give them a big workload of things you had been doing. Then they mess up the big sales order and your clients are angry and fed up. You are too, and you go back to doing things yourself because you feel the only way to get things done is to do them yourself.   

This is not a unique situation, but is a problem for many business owners at one point or another. The key to avoiding this mess is by establishing employee-based metrics before allocating duties. As management consultant Peter Drucker stated: what gets measured gets managed. With accurate measurements we can not only keep track of employee productivity, but ensure business processes are being functioning properly.

“We need to create key metrics or key scorecards to let us know when we need to redirect and do more coaching and step in if needed,” said business expert David Finkel. “This allows our team member to know who’s taking on that roll and how they are performing. If they can’t see the score, it’s like playing basketball blindfolded, without having an effective way of knowing how they are doing.”

Without employee metrics, it becomes nearly impossible to know if your business processes are being performing correctly. These metrics also reveal how processes your employees are handling are performing at any given moment.

Employee metrics are only one key part of effectively running a small to medium sized business though. Metrics are part of a broad scope of business measurement and analysis under the umbrella of business intelligence (BI), which is a set of application and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help businesses and other organizations make better decisions. For the last three years BI has ranked as the top priority for CIOs, according to Gartner.

Yet it all starts with employees working under you. No amount of metrics in your business can replace an employee, or overcome a lackadaisical employee. If you’re automating your business systems and handing over control of parts of your business, without metrics, you’ll be playing basketball in the dark.