This question has been posted by a reader Sarfaraz for the article “Writing SMART goals – part 3”.

This article is very good and it helped me to make an objective for my Department. I wounder if you could provide me some tips to guage employee performance (specially field staff). We provides service by receiving calls from customer and try to provide service as soon as possible.

Once again thanks for this article

Because I haven’t made any posts for a while, I thought this would be a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Here’s some classic ways to measure performance:

1. Quality
2. Quantity
3. Timeliness
4. Cost effectiveness

Sarfaraz’s question is specifically related to the service provided by field staff. So with that in mind, here’s some ideas:

Quality – you can measure the quality of the service provided by surveying the customer, using a mystery caller or having a more experienced officer monitor and review service provided.

Quantity – an example here might be the number of clients served in a given time period. Careful what you ask for here. Quality may suffer if you reward only quantity.

Timeliness – you could measure how long the customer needs to wait before service has been provided.

Cost effectiveness – A couple of ideas here. If your employee’s have control over the costs of components used in providing service, you can set a goal and measure the reduction in those costs. Another idea – escalating problems to a more senior person can be time consuming and costly. So you might choose to measure how many problems need to be escalated.

If anyone else can offer some suggestions for Sarfaraz I’d love to hear them.

Smart organisations are looking to get their people closely aligned to their corporate goals. These organisations are more successful by getting everyone moving in the same direction. To achieve this, their managers need to take the goals of their organisation, division and unit into account when setting objectives for their team.

But what if you’re a manager and your organisation provide little clarity around it’s goals?

This is a good question and one that a reader David has asked in response to my post on Writing Objectives that Produce Results.

I’m going to suggest three ways this can be tackled.

1. Use a balanced scorecard approach.
2. Focus on the output of your unit or team.
3. Focus on the workflow/processes within your unit or team.

The balanced scorecard approach
This approach takes into account a balanced set of factors that affect the long term success of an organisation.

• Financial.
• Customers.
• Internal processes.
• Learning and growth.

Using this approach you would set objectives for your team for each of these categories.

Financial
For business the objectives here are usually centred around increasing revenue or profits.

For not-for-profit and government organisations the objectives usually focus on reducing costs.

Customers
Examples are increasing customer satisfaction and retaining customers.

Internal processes
Objectives here focus on improvements to processes used within the organisation. For example implementing a CRM system.

Learning and growth
Goals that will help the individual become more capable and give the organisation the capacity to improve.

Focus on the output of your team
Using this method you focus on your customers (internal or external). Answer these two questions…

1. What services do you provide to them?
2. What outputs do you provide to them?

For each of these, your objectives can focus on one or more of …

• Improving quality.
• Increasing quantity.
• Reducing quantity.
• Improving timeliness.
• Improving cost effectiveness.

You might be wondering why I included reducing quantity. An example of this is reducing the number of errors in some output.

Focus on workflow
With this approach you create a flow chart for each of the processes within your team.

• What are the steps involved to provide services or products?
• Would it be beneficial to the organisation to improve any of these steps or replace them completely?
• If they can be improved, set goals and targets.
• Then set individual objectives for your team members that are linked to these goals and within their sphere of influence.

Happy goal setting.

Many organizations are conducting 360 degree feedback at the end of their annual review process. This is probably not providing much value and isn’t a great idea for a number of reasons.

The main reason is that people are focused on the outcome of their end of year review – their bonus or salary increase. It’s difficult to get someone focused on identifying their areas for improvement and creating development goals when you’re also talking to them about their salary increase or bonus.

Another reason 360 isn’t a good idea as part of the end of year review is that it’s not a review of past performance. Running it at this time of year creates an unavoidable perception that 360 is all about reviewing how well you performed. It isn’t – 360 degree feedback is simply a way of identifying a person’s behaviours. And that gives you two key things needed to coach someone for improvement. A way of providing feedback on behaviours and a measurement to gauge improvement.

So when should you run 360? The answer is at the start of the performance cycle or somewhere in the first three months. When you’re in looking forward mode and setting goals for the year. This suits 360 because you want people to look forward with the results – that is to plan how they are going to develop their areas needing improvement.

Next post

Setting SMART objectives when there’s little clarity of business goals.

Why do some people talk about “360 degree appraisal” instead of “360 degree feedback”. Are they talking about the same thing or are they different.

Well they are actually different. I’ve talked a fair bit about 360 degree feedback already, so let’s dive into 360 degree appraisal in this post.

My definition for 360 degree appraisal
The use of 360 degree feedback techniques to measure or rate a person’s achievements for one or more performance objectives.

This is different to 360 degree feedback which focuses on giving a person feedback on their capabilities using things like competencies, values and behaviours.

When to use 360 degree appraisal
When it comes to setting goals and objectives they have to be measurable to be effective. See writing SMART objectives for the reasons why.

But sometimes it’s difficult to work out how you can measure the outcome for an objective. For example, what do you do if there are no systems in place or if the objective just doesn’t lend itself to a hard measurement. What if there is an appropriate measure but the cost would make it impractical.

What do you do? If you don’t have a quality measure, the objective is pretty much a waste of time.

The answer is 360 degree appraisal. Use feedback from the manager, peers, direct reports and customers to rate the achievement.

An example of when it could be used
Let’s say you want to increase the number of people in a work unit who can provide a specific type of service to other groups. How would you measure it?

You could just measure the achievement based on the number of people trained to provide the service. But that’s really only measuring the action of training those people, not the outcome of people who can provide the service. Ideally you would want to measure the quality and quantity of the service.

The benefit of 360 degree appraisal here is that you can ask two types of people to appraise the outcome:

• People affected by the service.
• People who observe how well the service is provided.

When not to use 360 degree appraisal
If there’s a hard measure available and it’s cost effective, use it in preference over 360 degree appraisal. Especially if that measure comes from a system and you can gauge progress throughout the year using it.

For example, measuring someone on a sales objective using 360 degree appraisal would be inappropriate. Using the hard measure of their actual sales in money terms is much more effective at getting the end result you want.

David’s questions
Getting back to David, one of his questions was . . .

How do I set SMART objectives that I can clearly link to the business bottom line without necessarily having the clarity of business goals or resolution of metrics?

Something you can take away from this post is that 360 degree appraisal is an option you now have when there’s little or no resolution of metrics.

Next post…
We’re yet to look at:

• The best time to run 360.
• Setting SMART objectives when there’s little clarity of business goals.

Want to implement 360 degree feedback? Here’s my quick guide to make it happen.

Step 1 – what is the purpose of the feedback
Why do it in the first place? What do you want out of it? The answer to those questions will affect the way you set-up your 360 process, how you communicate about it with your people and how you review the process down the track.

For example, here’s two common reasons:

1. As part of an ongoing performance management process.

• Making sure your people have the capabilities needed to achieve the corporate goals.
• Developing people to improve performance.

2. As part of a leadership development process.

• Targeting development for participants.
• Providing a post measure of the effectiveness of the program.

Check out my previous post – Why use 360 degree feedback in the first place.

Step 2 – gain commitment from management
Management need to be committed to the 360 degree feedback process for it to work. If they aren’t committed, your people will see this and the process won’t be effective.

Getting management to buy into it comes down to why you are doing it in the first place. A direct financial argument also helps – this’ll be the subject of a future post.

Step 3 – involve your people up front and pilot the process
Involve your people in the design of the process. Use a nice cross section of people – the ones who’ll be affected by the process.

You need:

• To get them to buy into the reasons for doing 360.
• To get input on how to run the process to make sure it’ll work in the real world.
• To get input and feedback on the competencies (see step 3).

Implement 360 with a pilot group first. Get feedback and make any changes needed before going out to the wider group.

Step 4 – what competencies or values will be used
You can get feedback on almost anything including your new hair style, but the most common things are:

• Competencies.
• Values.
• Behaviours.

Many organisations have a core set of competencies or values. Some also have leadership specific capabilities. And those who have advanced to Jedi level use role specific competencies.

Where do you get the competencies from? There’s heaps of libraries. And if you use a software package to do your 360s it may already have one.

Choose the competencies that will support your corporate goals. Use around seven competencies all up.

The competencies will form a questionnaire that feedback providers will complete. Decide on a rating scale to use with the questionnaire. The competency library you use will probably suggest one.

Step 5 – who will provide coaching – they may need to be trained
When your people eventually receive their feedback they’ll need someone to help them understand it and to create a plan to develop areas needing improvement. This person needs to be skilled at coaching. It is usually a person’s manager, someone from HR or a coaching professional.

If you want your managers to provide coaching and they aren’t skilled in this area, they’ll need some training.

Step 6 – communicate with your people – let them know why and how
Let your people know these things:

• That a new process called 360 degree feedback is being implemented.
• Why it is being implemented – see step 1.
• What it is.
• How it will work.
• What they will get out of it.
• What they need to do.

Step 7 – who will receive feedback and who will provide it
Alright now you need to determine who is going to receive feedback – the people being reviewed. Once this is done, the feedback providers need to be selected. There are two ways this is typically done . . .

1. The employee nominates their own reviewers and gets their manager’s approval.
2. The manager nominates the reviewers.

Employee nomination is better – why – because people take more notice of feedback from people they know well and respect. At first your people may not get the whole idea of what the feedback process does for them. So the manager approval process is needed to make sure people don’t kid themselves by choosing buddies to give them feedback.

Step 8 – ask people to provide feedback
The next step is to ask the reviewers to provide feedback. They do this by responding to a questionnaire and providing any written comments.

It’s also essential that a person completes a self review. This really helps a person identify gaps between how they see themselves and how they are perceived by others.

Step 9 – follow-up and collate feedback
Collate responses for each person receiving feedback. Follow-up with stragglers to make sure they respond before the deadline.

Step 10 – produce reports
A report is produced for each person receiving feedback. This helps them understand the feedback provided by each of their reviewers.

Responses from each of the reviewers, except managers, are generally aggregated. This protects anonymity and makes sure that an individual’s responses can’t be identified. So for example, instead of seeing each direct report’s individual response, you’ll see an average of all direct report responses.

Manager responses aren’t normally anonymous. In other words a person would be able to see exactly what feedback their manager provided.

Step 11 – provide coaching
The report is provided to the person receiving feedback as part of a coaching and development process. This should be done by someone skilled at coaching – this could be the person’s manager, someone from HR or a coaching professional.

The report is used to help the person identify, understand and gain confidence in their strengths. It’s also used to highlight opportunities for improvement and areas for development.

The coach helps the person create a plan to develop their capabilities. The person undertakes the development with progress being reviewed as part of the coaching process.

Step 12 – post implementation review
After your pilot program and after the first full 360 degree feedback process, conduct a post implementation review. The purpose of this review is to determine:

• Whether the feedback is producing the result you wanted.
• Where improvements can be made to the process.

And finally . . .
360 degree feedback can be a time consuming process if done manually. A good software package will take care of all the time consuming tasks and leave you to concentrate on getting results from the process.

In the next set of posts . . .
I’ll continue my exploration of 360 in order to fully respond to David’s questions. We’ll look at:

• What is 360 degree appraisal.
• The best time to run 360.
• Setting SMART objectives when there’s little clarity of business goals.

Thanks to Edylyn for the questions to my post – what is 360 degree feedback. Look forward to hearing how it all goes.

The need for 360
An organisation starts off with a goal to achieve something. To reach that goal they need a plan. Turning that plan into action and achieving the outcome requires people. But not just any people. The organisation needs people with specific capabilities. And the more capable they are, the more capable the organisation is!

By capabilities I mean both technical skills and things like the ability to lead and communicate well.

Alright, once the organisation identifies the capabilities needed to achieve its goals, the next question is . . . do we have those capabilities? This is actually an ongoing question – people leave, retire and are promoted.

There’s a number of ways of answering this question. All with varying degrees of accuracy. Some very inexpensive and some very costly.

For example, you could ask managers to assess their staff as part of the annual review. This is inexpensive to do, but suffers from quite a few problems – the biggest of which is that it’s one perception and potentially highly inaccurate as a result. What a manager sees an employee as being able to do (or not do) could be very different to what the person’s peers, customers and direct reports see.

Enter 360 degree feedback. It’s inexpensive and is a lot more accurate. That’s essentially what it comes down to – it’s a good tool for the job.

So once the organisation knows what capabilities it does and doesn’t have, it needs to fill the gaps. There’s two ways of doing this:

1. Recruit people.
2. Develop people internally.

Buying in skills can work well, but is difficult when there’s a shortage of skilled people. Plus it can be costly for new recruits to build the knowledge of internal systems within a company. So a combination of the two approaches is used.

It turns out that 360 degree feedback is also really useful for developing people. It identifies precisely where the development is needed so you don’t end up wasting a huge amount of money on training that people don’t need. And it also provides something that’s needed for effective development – a measure of progress and achievement.

David’s questions
This is the third post to answer the questions asked by David in response to 5 tips for writing objectives that produce results.

There’s a few of reasons for going into detail on 360:

1. To make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
2. To describe it for others who may not be familiar with it.
3. To provide the foundation for my suggestions for David.

So what are those suggestions at this point?

• From the previous posts and this one, something really stands out – his organisation needs a clear set of goals for the year.
• These goals then drive employee objectives and the competencies used in the 360 process.
• David may not be able to persuade his organisation to do this on his own – but he can develop some goals for his group.
• SMART objectives can be used to lift performance and remove annual review headaches.
• The 360 degree feedback process needs to be done at a time other than the end of year review.
• The results of the feedback should not affect pay/bonuses.
• Open-ended questions can be used to get some useful feedback on areas that need to be developed.

From the comments to the previous post it’s clear that David’s company needs to review their reasons for doing 360 in the first place. It’s not being used to address the need described in this article.

In the next set of posts . . .
We’ll be looking at:

• How 360 degree feedback works.
• What is 360 degree appraisal.
• The best time to run 360.
• Setting SMART objectives when there’s little clarity of business goals.

The definition
360 degree feedback is a process for providing a person with structured feedback from a group of people who have a range of different perspectives.

For example, a manager can receive feedback on their leadership, communication and planning & organising capabilities from their direct reports, peers, their own manager and possibly internal and external customers.

Now what I think about 360
It is a gift. It’s like asking people to help you become more successful and them saying, OK sure.

You know how you can always see things in others that they can’t see themselves. You can see things that they’re good at and sometimes you wonder why they don’t put them to better use. Other times you can see things in people that are holding them back. You wonder why they can’t see those things themselves. If only they did such and such they would be so much more successful – why don’t they do it.

Well, we have a single perception of ourselves and we can’t see outside that. It stops us from seeing those things that others see in us.

360 degree feedback is all about breaking through that single perception to help you be more successful. It’s about giving you confidence in your abilities, seeing the strengths that other people recognise. And it’s about identifying the areas where you can develop and grow – the things that’ll help you be more successful.

360 degree feedback is like being Mel Gibson in the movie What Women Want. Being able to see himself as others saw him and benefiting as a result.

Getting back to David’s questions
This is the second post in a multi-part article where I’m addressing the questions raised by David in response to my post on 5 tips for writing objectives that produce results.

Last post we looked at the problem of 360 degree feedback becoming a replacement for quality objectives.

In this post I’ve talked briefly about what 360 is capable of doing. What would be great to know – if David is willing to comment on it – is how 360 is seen by himself and the people he’s working with? Is it helping him to be more successful?

When David says “360 has become a crutch because KPIs are almost always vague and unmeasurable” – I suspect that like many organisations 360 is being used as quasi assessment or performance review tool. This is largely a problem of perception. But it isn’t helped by the majority of companies who run it as part of the end of year review. This is the wrong time to use 360.

Coming up . . .
To continue shedding light on the answers to David’s questions, in the next series of posts we’ll be looking at:

• The need for 360 degree feedback and how it works
• What is 360 degree appraisal.
• The best time to run 360.
• Setting SMART objectives when there’s little clarity of business goals.

This is the first of a multi-part article where I’ll address the questions raised by David in response to my post on 5 tips for writing objectives that produce results. Here’s a summary of what he had to say . . .

• He finds 360 degree feedback orders of magnitudes better than the traditional methods.
• But the implementation in his company limits the true potential.
• He believes the way they are using 360 allows managers to avoid providing constructive feedback.
• It has become a crutch because KPIs are almost always vague and unmeasurable.
• David wants to know how to tie 360 degree feedback to personal and company KPIs.

I think it’s great that David has identified problems with his organisation’s current process and is looking for solutions. So to respond to David’s comments I’m going to post a few articles over the coming weeks on various 360 degree feedback topics. In the process the answers to David’s questions will be illuminated.

360 degree feedback has become a crutch
OK in this post I want to focus on one of the really interesting parts of David’s comments. He says 360 degree feedback has become a crutch because KPIs are almost always vague and not measurable.

The first point I need to make here is that writing good quality KPIs is the most important part of the whole performance process. Everything else is next to useless if this isn’t done. People need a specific goal, otherwise they aren’t going to arrive at the right destination.

The problem with vague goals comes to a head at review time
One of the problems of using vague and unmeasurable goals occurs at review time. Because there’s no way of measuring achievements, the end result has to come down to the manager’s opinion. So your performance result rests on the way your manager feels about your performance, or their observations of your performance.

The problem for both the manager and employee here is what happens next. It’s almost inevitable . . . disagreement! The employee feels they have busted their gut for the company and the manager might agree but hasn’t seen the results they wanted. So you end up with dissatisfaction, growing cynicism, less and less engagement . . . looking for another job!

360 degree feedback
Enter 360 degree feedback. Now it’s not just your manager’s opinion. Your peers, reports and customers get input. And they provide input based on a structured set of competencies, behaviours or values. This is great. You get some useful feedback on a person’s capabilities from a range of people with differing perspectives. Very useful stuff as we’ll see in the next article.

It’s no wonder 360 has become a crutch in David’s organisation.

It’s giving them useable information that is much less subjective than the manager’s opinion on performance against objectives.

There’s something missing here though. 360 degree feedback can tell us a lot about a person’s capabilities and behaviour, but it doesn’t tell us what the person has achieved. So you end up rewarding people for their capabilities, not on outcomes. And definitely not on outcomes tied to the organisations goals.

Quality objectives
I’m sure David’s not alone here. So if you can identify with this problem, the first thing that has to happen is quality objectives. They are essential. From his comments David has come to this conclusion as well. He’s asked the question how he sets SMART objectives without the clarity of business goals and resolution of metrics. So we’ll take a look at that as part of this set of articles.

Jump in
If you haven’t already, jump in and take a look at these three articles:

• 5 tips for writing objectives that produce results – part 1
• Objectives and SMART goals – part 2
• Objectives and SMART goals – part 3

To continue shedding light on the answers to David’s questions, in the next series of posts we’ll look at:

• What is 360 degree feedback.
• What is 360 degree appraisal.
• The best time to run 360.
• Setting SMART objectives when there’s little clarity of business goals.

In part 1 of this article we looked at the definition of a SMART objective. In part 2 we turned the problem producing provide good service to all customers into new SMART objectives.

There’s three things left to do that’ll make the new objectives work really well for you. On top of this they’ll help remove headaches come review time. They are…

Measurement
Performance standards, and
Actions.

Let’s see what this looks like with our two new objectives from part 2 (Retain 99% of your customers, and Increase your Customer Service Satisfaction Rating to 4). We can break these objectives down further.

Objective: Retain customers

Measurement: Percentage of your customers retained. Using data from the CRM system.

Performance standard:
90 – 92% = partially met
93 – 95% = met
96 – 98% = exceeded
over 98% = outstanding

Objective: Increase customer satisfaction

Measurement: Your average customer satisfaction rating. Measured using the monthly mystery shopper result.

Performance standard:
This objective will be partially met when:

• Average time taken to respond to customer requests is 4 minutes.
• Mystery shoppers record that you are usually courteous.
• Fewer than 1 in 10 enquiries need to be escalated to the supervisor.
• On your follow-up, 7 out of 10 customers report that their needs have been met and no further action is needed.

It will be met when:

• Average time taken to respond to customer requests is 3 minutes.
• Mystery shoppers record that you are almost always courteous.
• etc…

I’m using Measurement to describe the source of the data and how it will be measured. The Performance standards are basically explaining how the end rating or score will be determined.

This is great! Once those objectives are agreed by the manager and employee, there’s no disagreement as to the result.

But wait … that’s not all – if the employee knows how to measure their progress, they’ll know how they are traveling. Why does this matter? Well, when something is achievable and you know how you’re traveling, you’re much more motivated to reach the end goal.

Making the objective a more powerful statement
OK, now something I do to turn the objective into a really powerful statement . . .

Find out what sort of result your team member wants to achieve. Then write that into the objective. So Retain 99% of your customers for example. The measurement and performance standards stay the same. It’s just a memory aid. Making sure that when you think of the objective, you think of the target as well.

To illustrate why this technique is useful, it might be useful to relay a story about Ethan Hunt’s first six months working at Mission Impossible.

Basically he used to receive his jobs via video recordings on his iPod. The message would describe the mission goal, measurement and performance criteria. And then the iPod would self-destruct.

The only problem was within five minutes of the iPod self-destructing, poor old Ethan would be like Oh crap! How many bad guys was I supposed to capture again?

Now they include the target in the objective. And you know the rest of the story – he’s been very successful since!

Back to serious stuff now – a word of caution – don’t use this technique where there is a potential for putting an employee on a performance improvement program for unacceptable performance.

Actions
One thing left to do . . . and this is an important one. How is the objective going to be achieved? What actions are needed? You need to describe the steps or plan for reaching the goal.

Even if your organisation hasn’t reached the point yet where a manager and employee set objectives jointly, you at least need to have input on this one from the employee. For employees with little experience, you’ll need to do most of the work here in terms of outlining the actions. But even then, I’ve been amazed at the value of the ideas provided by inexperienced employees. It is so worth getting employees involved.

For people with a lot of experience, you’re really going to benefit by using their collective knowledge and skills. And they’ll be more satisfied and more likely to be motivated if they have planned their own action steps.

Some things to avoid…

OK there’s a few things you need to avoid when writing objectives. I’m not providing legal advice though, so if you want a definitive answer on what you can and can’t do, you’ll need to consult someone who can provide that advice.

• Objectives must be achievable.
• Avoid using terms that don’t allow a margin for error like always, every, each, all, never.
• An objective can be very challenging, but it should be possible for someone to achieve outstanding performance.
• Avoid describing objectives as things you don’t want done, focus on what you want achieved instead.
• There can’t be an expectation for a person to be perfect.

Go for it!
OK there you have it. I hope you’ve got something from these three articles on writing objectives that produce results. Thank you to everyone for your comments and emails.

At the start of your next review cycle write SMART objectives. You’ll reduce your performance review headaches . . . . . and be more successful.

Alright, let’s get straight into it.

What I want to do is revisit the “Provide good service to all customers” objective from part 1 of this article. This is the sort of objective that leads to what I call the dreaded annual appraisal. So I’m going to show you how to turn that problem producing, airy fairy, jumble of words into something that’ll make a real difference.

The first thing to recognize in “Provide good service to all customers” is that it’s an action, not an objective. Objectives should be outcomes or accomplishments, not the actions that lead to them. So what’s the outcome you’re really looking for when you say “provide good service to all customers”?

You would be looking to have satisfied customers. And ultimately you would be looking to retain customers. And the reason for this is that income generally comes from two sources; new customers and existing customers. And existing customers usually account for a greater proportion.

So how do we re-write it as a SMART objective. First look at the organisation’s goals. Imagine the organisation has a goal to retain 99% of customers. We want our objective closely aligned with that goal. And the easiest way to do that would be to make the objective…

Retain 99% of your customers

This sort of objective would work well in a lot of situations. But what about the person working on the front line handling enquiries. Their actions influence whether a customer is retained. But there are many other factors out of their control. So in that case what you want to do is use an objective like this…

Increase your Customer Service Satisfaction Rating to 4

I’m assuming a rating system for customer satisfaction from 1 to 5. I’ll talk about how to measure these in the next article. When you use an objective like that, make sure you let the person know it’s linked back to the organisation’s goal of retaining 99% of customers. So there’s more to their job than an uninspiring job description. They’re involved in the real mission.

So which objective do you think would get better results?

The old style Provide good service to all customers

or the SMART Retain 99% of your customers

OK, that should get you running through the office like a football player who’s just kicked a goal. Fist in the air, one finger pointed, holding your shirt out with the other hand.

Um hello! I can’t see myself running around in my office I hear you say. Yeah OK, but you will be kicking goals. And best of all, the goals will have a measurable affect on the bottom line.

In case anyone missed it – I just said B O T T O M L I N E.

I’ve had some feedback about the length of the articles, so I’m going to keep this short and talk about how to measure the objectives in part 3.