Source: www.kpilibrary.com
You just won’t get people’s buy-in and ownership of performance measures without their genuine involvement.
I’m honestly not certain of why this is the case. But I’ve never seen any exception to it. What’s more, I’ve seen buy-in and ownership blossom almost exclusively from genuine involvement of people in the measurement process.
Inviting people to presentations to show them the measures, or sending around an email inviting them to give their input, or sitting with them one to one to explain the measures to them are NOT methods of genuine involvement.
I’ve learned that real involvement, the kind that does nurture buy-in and ownership, has a few important qualities you just can’t be cursory about:
- The involvement has to be voluntary, or the person at least needs to believe they are consciously exercising a choice about being involved or not.
- The involvement has to be hands-on. People must feel their ideas are contributed and heard and considered before the measures are signed off.
- The involvement has to uphold the dignity of people. Their input has to be truly wanted and valued—even if it is not used. They need to feel some degree of safety in offering their ideas, never fear of ridicule or being ignored.
- The involvement has to give them something back, like some skills or knowledge they feel will be useful to them, or hope that their work life will be better in some way, or enjoyment in what they’ve traditionally experienced as a dry and tedious topic.
- The involvement has to be facilitated to a valuable end, most obviously a collection of performance measures they can feel excited about, and do in fact bring to life so they can use them to improve performance.
What would these qualities of genuine involvement look like if you were applying them?
There’s not one right answer, of course. So I’ll illustrate the qualities by sharing the approach that I, and my team of PuMP Consultants, take when we work with organisations that realise buy-in is at least as important as the measures they are crafting. You could consider this like a checklist of how and when to involve people in the process of measuring performance.
What do they want measurement to mean to them?
An under-appreciated prerequisite to people being genuinely involved in performance measurement is shared meaning of what it’s for and how it should work.
What we do here is have an informal discussion to help people express and explore their beliefs about and struggles with measurement, and relate how the approach we’re taking—in our case it’s PuMP—tackles those struggles. Start from their current experiences, not educating them in a new approach.
What do they think matters most to measure?
You might be staggered to hear that most people don’t understand truly which results they have responsibility for. And it’s absolutely essential to sort this out before you utter the word “measure”.
We guide people through a dialogue to tease out the measurable performance results they are meant to achieve, and are worth measuring.
Which measures do they believe will be useful?
Another important time for genuine involvement is selecting measures for performance results. Even if the measures that people offer up are not perfect, their ownership of the measures is much more important than the measures themselves.
Rather than leading, we hold the space for people to craft and choose meaningful measures they feel excited about.
What are the realities of reporting the measures?
It’s the people that do the day to day work who often know the realities about data collection and capture. They see it, they do it, they struggle with it, first hand.
We ask for their genuine involvement in defining how each measure will be implemented, and this makes all the difference in future practicality and ease.
How will they use those measures to help them?
One of the loudest complaints about measuring is the time and effort of data capture and reporting, and never seeing anything come from the reports.
We encourage people to measure what’s useful to them, and to set up the discipline of regularly referring to their own measures to make improvements in the work they do.
Whoa—how much involvement is really necessary?
You might now reflect on these ideas for involving staff in measuring performance and think, is there anything about measuring performance that staff shouldn’t be involved in?
And you’re on the right track. If you want staff to be engaged in monitoring and improving performance, they have to have a lot of ownership of the measures. And to get that ownership, they need to have active involvement in each step of choosing and implementing and using those measures.
Doing the job is not enough. We are responsible for doing it well. So measurement is a part of EVERYBODY’S job.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stacey Barr is a specialist in organisational performance measurement, helping corporate planners, business analysts and performance measurement officers confidently facilitate their organisation to create and use meaningful performance measures with lots of buy-in. Sign up for Stacey’s free email tips atwww.staceybarr.com/202tipsKPI.html and receive a complimentary copy of her renowned e-book “202 Tips for Performance Measurement”.
