Reasons to be thoughtful about KPIs

Walking through the grocery aisle, I run into quite a few employees shopping for other customers for pickup later, a practice that started with the pandemic.
What I notice is that these employees are not very aware of me or other customers in the store. They’re focused on finding the items on their list.

They don’t seem to be aware when they or their cart are in my way and preventing me from getting what is on my own grocery list. However, other employees of the store, who might be restocking shelves, do notice when they’re in the way and move aside or try to help with more of a service orientation.

I read a while back that these internal shoppers were tightly managed and assessed on the speed with which they can fulfill the order.

Being measured on that by the management has the employees focus on their speed and efficiency, and not on the impact to shoppers in the store.

I was listening to John Oliver Tonight’s episode on college loan debt. He mentioned how one loan servicing company measured employee performance, according to a whistle blower, on keeping their calls under 7 minutes. If they went over 7 minutes, their performance was downgraded. Since they often couldn’t answer the complexity of questions they received in 7 minutes, the customer service people started to hang up on the student borrower at the 7 minute mark. Oops.

Here’s what we miss: anytime management opens its mouth, they’re telling people where to focus. If you have certain measures for performance, employees will create specific actions toward those measures.

But client experience is not equal to the KPI. A client experience is whole: nice store, but I keep getting blocked or run over by employees. Good bank—but I can never get my questions fully resolved.

It makes me wonder why we miss what really drives the P&L. If we think our P&L can be adequately met with too tight guidelines (Boeing, student loans, shoppers), the collective client feeling toward that company becomes one of distrust, even as the internal metrics look profitable and successful.

When we hammer on specific success KPIs, but not a wholistic view, we’re sacrificing vitality of people, and client trust with the company.

Be careful and thoughtful about what you measure in your business and how you choose to measure employees’ performance.

Of course, a company has internal measures of performance. Often these are designed to create the desired performance from their employees.

You want to make sure that the internal measure doesn’t create a conflict of interest or compromise another value you find important, such as service.