Why Should Employee Measures Not Be Evaluated Equally? | [Part 2 – Design Your Goal Achievement Journey]

In my previous post [Link to Post], we talked about the importance of differentiating employees’ performance measures based on their importance, to produce more accurate scoring within your performance management system.

Today, we are going to have an exercise by defining a set of performance measures set and see how we can distinguish different types of results and assign them weights to indicate their importance and produce consistent scoring.

The Freshest Pizza In Town

Think about a pizza restaurant with a mission to create a unique dining experience for pizza fans, by delivering the freshest pizza in town.

The chef in the restaurant is one of the employees contributing to this mission. If we think of the steps the chef follows to ensure delivering a fresh pizza that satisfies the appetite of the guests, we can think of the following:

• Buy ingredients every day to guarantee maximum freshness.
• Have all required tools maintained and ready to use (oven, pans, utensils, etc.)
• Have a special recipe for a unique pizza.
• Prepare the dough and let it rest.
• Pre-heat the oven.
• Spread the ingredients on the dough.
• Bake as needed.
• Deliver the pizza to guests’ tables on time

If you look at the steps, you will notice that they make a path of deliverables towards achieving the final goal (a special fresh yummy pizza). Without any single action, the ultimate goal won’t be accomplished, or at least, not as per the required level of quality.

We will use those as a quality checklist, constituting the base of the performance measures of the Chef at this restaurant. However, we are first going to categorize them into different types based on three main factors:

• Their contribution to the overall journey of delivering a fresh pizza.
• The influence of the Chef on each one of them.
• Whether they are transitional (intermediate) or final targets.

As you see, not all objectives are equally crucial to the achievement of the goal. Some are more important than others. Some as just transitional results leading to the final goal and some are equally important in the final delivery but have multi-contributors (not solely the chef).

If we consider preparing the pizza a journey of its own, the above steps could be illustrated this way along the path:

And if we generalize the route based on result types, it will look something like the below:

Based on this, we are going to putt those results in different categories. To calculate the performance score of the chef, we will also assign them different weights to indicate their importance and give more focus on the most critical results required.

The below table sums up the types of results an employee could be evaluated on. (Please note that weights are general ones for guidance purpose only. Each organization can define its weights based on the best scoring scheme that matches the business needs; a process which requires thorough analysis and testing).

Part 3 of this post will dig into more details into the above categories, their types, weights, and when they can be used.

For the time being, try to apply the above exercise on one of the functions within your organization, and keep the results along the path until we meet again.