This is part three of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.
The OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 20% of your time on work regarding your employees – the “Employee Category,” which we’ll walk through here.
Let’s admit it. While we talk a lot about how important employees are to us, it’s appalling how little time we actually have to spend on them. After all, employee engagement is a leading indicator of financial performance[1] including customer ratings, productivity and profitability. We spend a lot more time worrying about what our customers say and think, and making sure our financials are in order (Business Category, in OCMF parlance) than we do about employees.
Once again, there are two sets of measures – one for executives and one for managers.
Employee Category
Working definitions:
- Employee Engagement is a periodic survey that measures how emotionally connected an employee is to the organization. There are a number of commercial options, or you can create your own as many organizations have done.
- Employee Satisfaction is also a periodic survey, this one measures how happy an employee is with their current job and conditions.
- Percent of Serviceability Suggestions from Employees Accepted are the suggestions from your employees that are implemented as a percentage of those that were submitted.
- Time to Proficiency is a measure of how quickly a new team member is ‘proficient’ in their job or how quickly an existing team member learns a new skill.
Time to proficiency is probably a new measure for most of us. As business leaders, we need to build employee capabilities up so that they have the skills to move at the speed of business. In our opinion, for team-based environments, unless required by law, the only two things that matter are
- Does your team think you are ready to do the job independently?
- Are your individual measures as good or better than your team’s measures in terms of customer-related scores?
This changes the focus from ‘control and compliance’ to something far more powerful – team-based measures where you help or let the team down, not your boss. This also shifts accountability for the team’s success to the team, not the manager. The manager’s job then becomes to facilitate the team’s success, not managing to arbitrary numbers that mean very little.
Emerging Measure: If you don’t systematically collect and act on service-related suggestions from your employees you should start to do so now. One of the most common frustrations of customer facing teams is that while they know more about the internal workings of your entire organization than any other group, their opinions/ideas for improvements are rarely solicited or acted on.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/163130/employee-engagement-drives-growth.aspx
Get started today:
- Learn how your measures stack up against the Open Customer Metrics Framework with a free OCMF self-assessment (released under a Creative Commons license) from Klever Insight.
- Join the Open Customer Metrics Framework LinkedIn group and share your journey.
- Klever Insight software is built from the ground up using OCMF principles. See the last image on this page for a visual on how the standard is built into the measures for Klever Insight.