A trend I’ve seen within the last couple of years as been to measure performance of employees through a series of metrics, which are numerical representation of performance, service, quality, etc. A couple of thoughts have come up as I’ve spoken to a few business partners:
- You will always have a couple of people who want to have high numbers – and while that may appear good on the surface, make sure that they are not sacrificing unmeasured areas to make the measured numbers look good;
- Make sure that you’re using sound statistical calculations – when your numbers don’t appear to correlate to real life, there is a problem – don’t trust the numbers of themselves, make sure they make sense in real life;
- Have a combination of public and confidential metrics. That is, have a series of measurements which are published and discussed. These are areas where team members can strive to achieve and improve. Then hold a second set of metrics you use to measure your own management of these employees. Keep those measurements private. Do not disclose to the employees how you’re measuring in this area. Simply address problems as they occur, but kept your actual measurement system private;
- Your business goals, including customer service and profitable should be measured. Again, keep disclosed and undisclosed numbers.
Also, in the context above, everything is referencing “within the company” — an even smaller set of numbers (if any) should be published to the outside world.
Wow! 2008 ended up with a bang! We are really excited around the office with everything that has been keeping us going, and growing! We celebrated into the new years with some close business partners, and are excited about the prospects of the new year. We are beginning to see how those who are able to adapt to the new economy are thriving.
For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, there is still millions of dollars to be made out there, waiting to be spent – you simply need to learn how to adapt your business to capture it.
However, to that end, we’ve also seen some close friends lose their business, and sometimes go into personal bankruptcy as well. To this end, I’ll be offering a few articles in January about what we’ve learned while talking with this partners, friends, and associates.
Enjoy the new year!
Our power went out the other day, and as a result our phone system went down as well. It is amazing how the lack of phones will bring producitivity to a halt! Futhermore, we started receiving e-mails (on our blackberries) regarding our customers not being able to reach us.
Now, fortunately, we’ve already planned for a disaster senario similar to this, and we enlisted our phone provider which offered disaster recovery services. In this event, they were able to forward all of our inbound calls to their office where they setup a similar phone system to at least take our calls and drop them to voicemail, which we could then check with our cell phones periodically. That changeover too about 30 minutes to complete – and our power was out for 12 hours! What would that have been like had our phones been down that long.
When was the last time you looked at your customer inbound communication as an essential service, and what plans do you have for recovery should something similar happen to you?
Looking for a basic business valuation tool to help give you an idea on what your business value is currently. It combines more than just strict financial information, but also includes information such as the impact of ownership change, or loss of top 3 clients. I originally saw this over at: YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog » BizEquity – Free Business Valuation Tool. Take a moment to check out www.BizEquity.com today!
We have been recently reducing some of our excess inventory and office equipment online using Craigs List. It has been suprising how much of our necessary stuff finds value for other people. We could go through eBay and perhaps net a few extra bucks, but whatever the gain would likely be taken in Paypal and eBay fees, not to mention the hastle of shipping some of the items. Craig’s list has been great, cash for our old stuff, and they pick it up in person. Not a bad way to go. This also made me think it may be a good place to grab some office equipment in the future.
