In my last column, I explained how to manage employee performance. This column is going to focus on another part of the puzzle – performance metrics.

There is an old saying: “you get what you measure.” This means that employees focus most of their energy on achieving the organization’s goals and objectives and relatively little time on other areas that are not measured. This also means that it is extremely important to measure the right things; otherwise, the workforce will waste an enormous amount of time trying to hit targets that are not important to the organization.

What to Measure

In deciding what to measure, government organizations should try and use a balanced series of measures, rather than focusing on merely one or two. I recommend this approach because the over-arching goal should be to deliver good service to your customers; and not to simply achieve a couple of numbers that give a distorted view of the organization’s performance.

Moreover, if organizations concentrate on achieving only a couple of metrics and make them, it does not necessarily mean they are giving good service. For example, if they focus on quality and do good work but produce very little work in the process, the odds are that timeliness and productivity will suffer. If they concentrate on productivity, it is likely that quality and customer service will be adversely impacted.

That is why organizations should develop a balanced series of metrics – so they measure how well they are accomplishing their mission and serving their customers as opposed to how well they are meeting a few internal processing goals. In my experience, the best way to measure organizational performance is by developing metrics that cover the following categories:

• Quality
• Timeliness
• Productivity/Unit Cost
• Customer Service
• Employee Development and Satisfaction

Measuring performance in these five categories provides organizations with an excellent sense as to how they are doing from a number of different perspectives (e.g. the organization’s, customers’, employees’, etc.). If developed properly, the measures should also include both lagging and leading indicators. A lagging indicator reflects completed performance (e.g. average length of time to complete a product, quality of completed work, etc.) A leading indicator helps predict how performance will be in the future (e.g. the average age of unfinished work indicates what the average age of the future completed work may be; the number of phone calls received may indicate how satisfied your customers are – the more calls received, the less satisfied they may be; the degree to which your employees are well developed and/or satisfied may also indicate how well they will perform in the future.)

Displaying Performance

There are two basic ways of displaying performance: on a performance dashboard or on a balanced scorecard. Both approaches have their plusses and minuses. Let’s review each.

Performance Dashboard

A performance dashboard contains all of the key metrics in one fairly simple format. It shows the organization’s goals and how the organization is doing relative to them; usually on both a monthly and fiscal year-to-date basis. In many cases, the dashboard is color-coded for easy reference (e.g. green if you are achieving the goal; yellow if you are within 10% of the goal; and red if you are more than 10% away from the goal.)

The advantage of this approach is that it is easy to understand and apply. The disadvantage of this approach is that each of the metrics stands alone so it may be difficult to figure out how you are doing (e.g. if you are making 6 out of the 9 goals, is that good or bad? Are any of the goals more important than the others?)

Balanced Scorecard

A balanced scorecard measures performance in all the key metrics but also weights them so in many cases they are rolled up into one number, which represents the organization’s overall performance. As with the dashboard, performance in each of the metrics is often color-coded for clarity.

The advantage of this approach is that it looks at your performance from multiple perspectives in a holistic fashion with performance in every metric being weighted to produce a number that represents overall service delivery. As a result, managers and employees have to make choices as to where they focus their energies while at the same time being cognizant that performance in every measure helps drive the overall weighted score – which is service delivery.

The disadvantage of this approach is that it is not as simple to understand as a performance dashboard since a lot more math is generally involved and at least some people initially struggle with learning how to use the scorecard.

Overall, I prefer the balanced scorecard because once people understand how it works; they have a much sense as to how the metrics relate to each other and they tend to focus more on overall performance and less on individual measures.

How it fits Together

Once you develop or refine your metrics, the next step is to have a clear line of sight from the organization’s national goals and objectives, to the region and/or area level, to the field office level, the division and unit level, and finally down to the employee level (my next column will address how to write individual employee performance standards.)

Once these metrics are properly aligned, they should also be built into your information tracking and rewards and recognition systems so you have reliable consequences for achieving and not achieving the organization’s goals and objectives. As soon as you do this well, you will have taken a big step towards excellent performance.

Stewart Liff writes on human resources management issues in government for OhMyGov. A recipient of the President's Council on Management Improvement Award, he is the author of five books, including the just-released Improving the Performance of Government Employees. His expertise includes employee relations, labor relations, Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), performance management, staffing, training, rewards and recognition, metrics, systems design and succession planning.