Another example is a company that’s in the textile business. They call this gauge their matrimonial index, and that’s something everybody understands. The bottom of the scale is a lunch date and the top of the scale is married and they will love each other eternally.
So that to me is an example of an index. Another client, a bank, has an employee satisfaction index. One of the measures in there is how much do employees work on a regular basis. How many hours do they work? They can track when they go home at night but still spend two hours at night going through all their emails, they are still working.
Then they do a weekly how was your week survey; red, yellow, green, and you do it when you turn in your timesheet. If you had a green week you feel guilty getting paid, you had such a great week. Yellow is it’s pretty typical, but that’s why you get a paycheck, and the red is you’re thinking about putting your resume out there.
So everybody put this in there on a weekly basis and it gives them a way to measure the overall level of stress on a weekly basis. That goes into the index and they do focus groups once a month with a random selection of eight or ten employees and ask them ten questions and then they track turnover as a measure. They track absenteeism as a measure, and they track unused vacation time, people who don’t take their vacation because they are too stressed out or too overworked. So all these roll up into an index that says what level of employee satisfaction do we have in our company. So those are just a couple of examples indexes for complicated things that are hard to measure.