Engage Your Team
How to Make Measurement Drive Real Change
Are Your KPIs Gathering Dust? How to Make Measurement Drive Real Change We’ve all been there. Strategic plans with perfectly aligned Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), dashboards brimming with data, reports dutifully produced each month. Yet, despite all this activity, performance doesn’t seem to budge, decisions still feel like educated guesses, and improvement remains elusive. Why…
Are Your KPIs Helping or Hurting? The Critical Difference Between Measuring Performance and Judging People
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Just hearing the term can evoke a range of emotions in the workplace. For some, they represent clarity, direction, and a path to improvement. For many others, however, they are instruments of anxiety, distrust, and even perceived punishment. This stark difference in perception often boils down to one fundamental issue:…
How to Get Staff Buy-In for KPIs in 5 Steps
Let’s be honest-talking about ‘KPI buy-in’ might be a bit of a stretch at first. In most cases, when you’re rolling out key metrics, what you’re really aiming for is to avoid resistance and persuade people to comply with gathering the data. Truly getting employee buy-in usually only happens once people start seeing the actual…
Building a KPI Habit
Why a KPI habit is essential A KPI that is never reviewed or acted upon might as well not exist. Worse than that, an unreviewed KPI is a kind of ‘tax’ on the organisation, a costly piece of information that was never looked at or acted upon. Forming a ‘KPI habit’, particularly for short-term KPIs,…
Interviewing KPI Stakeholders and Subject Matter Experts
It is usually best to have a mixture of semi-structured interviews and stakeholder workshops. A semi-structured interview is one where you ask open questions and then listen carefully to the answers. When I conduct an interview I include: Introductions About you (the interviewer), who you are and why you are here. What your objectives are,…
Running KPI Stakeholder Workshops
KPI Stakeholder workshops are particularly useful when you are interested in gathering problem-related information or need to understand processes. Workshops are less suited to exploring more sensitive topics. Most of the steps are the same as for a semi-structured interview, although it is wise to dwell a bit less on the background of the participants…
Identifying KPI Stakeholders using RACI
Knowing who you need to talk to, gain agreement with or keep updated is central to implementing successful measures. Many management information projects fail because of political or communications problems. This makes it especially important that you clearly identify, document and manage your stakeholders. The first step is to identify who your stakeholders are. Stakeholders…
Engaging KPI Stakeholders – Communications
The challenge of managing change and complexity Because organisations are complex structures and the people within them are often anxious and busy, the ‘Engagement’ step is one of the easiest steps to mess up. Just working out who to talk to can be a serious challenge. Here are some key things you need to tackle…
Challenging Jargon: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, had a theory. In the spring/summer 1996 he tested that theory with an article he had submitted to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The article was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. In that article he theorised that quantum…
Report Engagement, 10 essential lessons from spam email
I hate spam, so I am reading a book on marketing emails (Email Marketing Rules: A Step by Step Guide to the Best Practices that Power Marketing Success by Chad White) to figure out how to create engaging emails that people actually want to read and open. Reading the list I realised these rules hold…