Are We What We Measure?

Consider this – you plan to conduct a community event and want your staff to align with the initiative. Would you measure the number of hours your employees put in or the value that the event has on the community?

If you do the former, the chances are that your staff might be focused on ‘meeting’ the numbers and if you do the latter, they will look at the cumulative effort that goes into making a difference.

What we measure can often drive how employees and leaders focus on everyday decisions that shape businesses.  I remember a senior executive sharing a scenario in a petroleum major where conversations among employees and managers dwelled on ‘getting the profits’ and didn’t focus much on the  ‘values’ and ‘the right way of doing work’. Over time, it seeped into the culture and possibly the reason why the organization got embroiled in manmade disasters and controversies.

As communicators we often evaluate better ways to engage our stakeholders and by understanding human behavior and personal motivation we can leverage measures appropriately.

Here are some pointers while you craft suitable measurement metrics into your communication plan:

–          Focus on the long term impact: Instead of metrics that gauge where you are currently with your campaign or initiative think of the long term value you can make.  Focus on the assets that can be used to scale your communication.

–          Turnaround time vs quality of response: While it is good to demonstrate efficiency by focus on a turnaround time a better metric is the quality of response in terms of content, consistency and reach.

–          Number of posts vs engaging conversations: On social media – internal or external, we are often tuned to showcasing the number of mentions we got on our channels while missing out on the reach and conversations that is probably more valuable for the brand.

–          Zero errors vs learning for the future:  It is great to aim for a zero error process but this can come in the way of learning from mistakes and improving your team’s ability to deliver consistently. My recommendation is to focus on getting better at capturing lessons from everyday situations and enhancing your impact with every new program you undertake.