Measuring your employees is a simple necessity that is made unnecessarily complicated by the misguided assumption that employees don’t want to be measured. In light of this erroneous supposition, many business owners - often under additional coercion supplied by their HR departments - opt to measure their employees by a set of wholly business-centric metrics that fail to account for the realities of the jobs the employees are asked to do, and the environmental limitations to performing those jobs.
Of course, this assumes that performance metrics have been established to begin with. On the other end of the spectrum, some business owners are so afraid to face backlash from their employees that they permit their workers to operate in an amorphous work environment without any baseline measurements for job-performance quality having ever been established.
In the end, neither of these approaches should be expected to yield a favorable outcome. On the one hand, employees are incapable of reaching goals that don’t exist, nor can they respect the mission of an organization if they are incapable of connecting their assigned tasks to the achievement of mission objectives.
Conversely, if your employees feel as if the metrics in place for gauging the quality of their job performance is both unfair and unachievable, they will conduct their job duties with a justifiable air of doom and defeat lingering over them. After all, not only are their personal performance goals unreachable, but their job can’t matter all that much to the organization’s mission if your company can somehow operate successfully despite assigning unattainable objectives to its employees.
Ultimately, the logical way to develop fair measurements for your workers in a manner that leaves them feeling inextricably linked with the mission of your organization is to involve them in the practice of establishing their own goals. Obviously, this necessitates that a conversation must take place with the employee being measured, and it can be a superb way for you to comprehend the day-to-day possibilities and challenges that each employee faces.
Simultaneously, having this conversation permits you to connect the duties of each of your workers to the core values of your company. By the time you are finished with these conversations, your employees will understand the connection between what they do, and how the organization fulfills its mission. Moreover, once you have partnered with your employees to hash out their responsibilities and the measurements of their job duties in a face-to-face fashion, they will be able to embrace the way they are measured, and be motivated to perform their tasks as a vital component in the pursuit of your company’s mission.
By having a seasonal conversation with each of your employees, you can generate and maintain momentum throughout your entire organization, and your employees will understand their importance to you, while acknowledging and internalizing precisely how much you value them.
