InetSoft Seminar: Performance Measures as a Tool to Drive Conversations

This is the continuation of the transcript of an in-person customer seminar hosted by InetSoft in July 2018 on the topic of "Performance Management Best Practices." The speaker is Christopher Wren, Principal Consultant at TFI Consulting.

So let me just quickly ask you, how many of you in your organization are using your performance measures as a tool to drive conversations between you and the workforce? Are you? Is it working? You bet? I want you to think about this. I am going to give you an example here of how we used our measures to stimulate the conversation between the workforce and what happened as a result of it. Folks, engaging employees is how you identify what to measure. Engage them in how you assess performance, and then engage them in how you improve performance and watch what happens. Ownership. It's not just ownership. It's more than that. They start feeling like they're involved in something important. And performance improvement drives performance improvement if the workforce is a part of it. Did you understand that? In other words it kind of creates its own self feeding cycling. I wish I had more time to share all my case studies with you. But I'll share one of them with you today.

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All right, perspective, we measure the wrong things. There's a difference between a conversation on value and a conversation on volume. We are really, really good at counting, aren't we? There's a ton of stuff you can count about with me. So if you were to find yourself in Manhattan, I am up there two weeks a month. You get on an elevator, and there's your hero, whoever it might be, and boom you are going up to the top floor of a high rise building. He says what do you, sir? And you tell him. You say, you know I am very interested in that. The moment of truth, you have got 45 seconds. What do you say?

We talk about what we are doing. We talk about volume not value. Do you all see this in your organizations at all? Here's another question for you. Are you measuring value in your organizations? Are you just counting what you can count? This is important. It's the difference between outcomes and outputs isn't it? It's the difference between outcomes and outputs. This is very difficult, but I want you to go home thinking about it because I want you to look at your measures and ask yourself, is this an outcome or is this an output?

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Because an output is an input to an outcome, right? Everybody follow that? An output is an input to an outcome. If you are trying to measure highway safety you tell the sheriff to go make that section of highway safe when he comes back and reports three months later, you say, what did you do to make the highway safe? He says, over the past three months, we stepped up regulation. We issued 200 more speeding citations than we normally do. What does that tell you? Yeah, it tells you how busy we've been. That number 200 is important, isn't it? But it's an incomplete story because that 200 is an input into what you are trying to get at, and what you are trying to get at folks? Safer highways, then how do you measure that?

What if the Sheriff say well on the past three months we stepped up regulation in those three months, we saw accidents decrease by 58%, we saw accidents involving injuries decrease by 75 percent, and we saw a 15 mile per hour average drop in speed because you have one of those clickers out there. It's a different story. Are you following me? Right.

So here's how organizations get to outcomes. I actually had them craft a desired outcome statement. Pick those eight key notes as eight key services you're providing 10, 12 harmonies. Get a group of employees together andask them, why we're doing that? Why are we doing that? Why we're doing that? What's the desired outcome? And then write the desired outcome statement and the good outcome measure will point right back to why it is you say you're providing it.


You all have these for your measures by the way, the services you are measuring. This is really interesting. You get a group of employees together, folks, and you ask them why we're providing this service and watch them struggle. So much of what we do in our organization life, we've lost touch with why we're doing it, and if you really want to get good measures to improve performance, you got to measure the why, the outcome. Is everybody following me on this? In your organization, do you think you have primarily a menu of output measures mostly? What do you all think? Think about it. All right. We declare victory too soon. This is very important. And I was just told I got 10 minutes. Is that for real? Wow. On my watch it says I have got 15. What is this? A stethoscope. What's a stethoscope? What kind of tool is this? It's a diagnostic tool, isn't it? This is really a measuring device.

Now, you want to see it work? You want to play doctor? What's your name again? Alexis? Watch this. Just watch it work. You just sit there. Everybody, look at him. Look at him. Look at stethoscope. Look at him, and back again. Okay, ready? I want you all stare at him, ready, go. How's it feeling? How's it feeling? We don't know why, why? Because you didn't use it. But I got a better idea. Let's get a 1,000 stethoscopes. Now, how's it feeling? Still doesn't tell you anything, does it? What's wrong? Folks, I want you to think about this, this is very important.


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