In “Five New Management Metrics You Need to Know,” James Slavet suggests new metrics that great teams should measure. Few are new, and even fewer could be considered metrics since they are largely unmeasurable, but being aware of them may help your team improve performance, so here they are:

1. Flow State Percentage. How many hours a day team members are “in the flow”—focused on a task without interruption—divided by the number of hours they work. According to Slavet, “studies have shown that each time flow state in disrupted it takes 15 minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all.” Find ways to reduce interruptions and productivity will go up.
2. Anxiety-Boredom Continuum. People are more productive when they are challenged without being overwhelmed, and they tend to be unproductive when they are bored. Observe team members for signs of boredom (low energy, showing up late and leaving early) or anxiety (reacting to setbacks with anger or frustration, getting sick a lot), ask them where they are on the continuum, and strike an effective balance.
3. Meeting Promoter Score. At the end of each meeting, “ask the participants to each rate from 1 to 10 how effective the meeting was, with one suggestion for making the meeting better,” Slavet writes. Then act on the suggestions.
4. Compound Weekly Learning Rate. The “ability to learn is like the compounding interest on an investment: after two or three years, a relentless learner stands head and shoulders above his peers,” states Slavet. One way to become a relentless learner is to integrate Baldrige. Another, proposed by Slavet, is to ask your team members how they got 1% better in the past week. What did they learn? Ask the question every week and you will help create a learning culture.
5. Positive Feedback Ratio. Strive for a positive-to-negative feedback ratio of 5:1. “Catch people doing good things,” writes Slavet. “Never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly.”

The problem with these “metrics” is that they are very hard to measure. I imagine an organization that sees value in one of them could find a way to measure it, but it will take some creativity and time to develop a meaningful, actionable metric. However, paying attention to all five areas will surely improve a team’s performance—even if they’re hard to measure.

Culture has a significant impact on the bottom line.

Burson-Marsteller and the Great Place to Work Institute asked senior executives from 20 of the top 25 “best multinational companies” for 2011 about the value of a positive work environment. Deidre Campbell highlighted the findings in this article on the HBR Blog Network:

• They invest more in their employees: 30% are investing more in work-life programs such as flex-time and health benefit while the other 70% are holding steady. None is cutting back.

• They provide stability: 75% of respondents valued most those programs that communicate brand mission and provide career development opportunities, compared to 15% who valued traditional benefits like health insurance and family leave and 5% who valued onsite benefits such as cafeterias and childcare.

• They value culture: “When asked which elements of workplace commitment most benefit daily operations, companies ranked culture at 80% and recruitment/retention at 70%,” writes Campbell. Competitiveness, customer loyalty, innovation, and productivity each garnered less than 20%.

• They share their story: 70% of respondents said customers are the most important external audience for understanding the company’s commitment to being a great workplace. Investors came in second at 35%. The “great workplace” story is part of these companies’ brands, how they do business, and that’s a story they want to share.

As Campbell concludes, “Being a great workplace is the result of a long-term investment in their employees. As the top-ranked companies demonstrate, this kind of investment will increase productivity, improve recruitment and retention, and save costs—all positively impacting the bottom line.”

To read more about creating a great workplace, click on these articles:

• 3 Things Employees Care about Most
• Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
• A Culture That Values Employees
• Understanding Employee Requirements
• Employee Hierarchy of Needs
• MEDRAD: Win with Your People

And then there’s Human Resources, which seems to have inherited a seat at the table. It performs essential services—recruiting, hiring, compensation, benefits—that every company needs, so it can justify its presence in the C-suite, but it rarely carries the influence that shapes strategy or drives performance excellence.

But it could.

Brad Power writes about this in “Why Doesn’t HR Lead Change?” He defers to Dave Ulrich, a University of Michigan professor recognized by HR Magazine as the most influential person in HR, who said there are three human resources processes that are critical to embedding a culture of continuous improvement:

Talent flow. Human Resources can develop processes for hiring and promoting that recognize the attitudes and behaviors their companies seek. Managers hire for expertise, not attitudes and behaviors, yet attitudes and behaviors that align with and support the culture and direction of the company are essential to continuous improvement. HR can make sure this dimension is considered.

Rewards. “Continuous improvement demands that people not only carry out their jobs, but improve their work too,” writes Power. I’ve never seen a more succinct explanation of why organizations need to integrate the Baldrige model. Tying rewards to continuous improvement is a problem for HR because “HR people typically don’t have the operational experience, expectation, or permission to engage line managers in changing rewards to encourage operational improvement.”

Training and Development. Your learning and development system tells people what is important at your company. If it does not provide the knowledge and skills people need to improve their work, the message is that continuous improvement is not important. HR rarely pushes for improvement training unless it is driven by senior leadership.

According to Power, to lead change, HR must: (1) “use its power and influence to help leaders focus on customers, long-term business results, and building capabilities in their people—not a personal or HR agenda”; (2) be a partner, not just support; and, (3) get operational experience so they “know which knife, fork, or spoon to use when they’re at the table.”

To read more about the role HR can play in continuous improvement, click on these articles:

• Strategic Human Resources
• How to Hire for Values
• MEDRAD: Win with Your People
• Best Practice People Management

• How does strategic HR drive competitive excellence?
• What skills does HR need to develop to contribute in the C-suite?
• How is talent acquired to build the future, to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives?

The conversation produced these insights:

• HR is positioned to drive competitive excellence if it is fully aligned with business goals. The Baldrige Criteria ask a key question about this: What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
• Organizational capacity building is a direct and powerful contribution HR can make if it is fully aligned with the future direction of the enterprise. In addition to the question above, the Baldrige Criteria ask: How do you organize and manage your workforce to address your strategic challenges and action plans?
• Senior HR professionals must be well-versed in business drivers including financials, industry, market circumstances, and competitive intelligence to be considered a player in the C-suite.
• As the world transitions from hierarchical leadership to self-organizing collaboration, HR is positioned to support or drive this shift. The HR section of the Baldrige Criteria addresses this shift by asking: How do you foster an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce?

To read more about the role of human resources in helping organizations achieve performance excellence, click on these articles:

• Understanding Employee Requirements
• Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
• MEDRAD: Win with Your People
• Best-in-Class Workforce Planning

One reason is the cost of labor, which has risen enough in other countries to negate one of the biggest reasons to ship jobs overseas. Another is the threat to supply chains made painfully visible by the recent earthquake in Japan. A third reason is the productivity of American workers, which is largely responsible for the rise in profitability despite recessionary pressures and high unemployment.

One of the key drivers of profitability among American manufacturers has been the implementation of Lean. In an IndustryWeek article available here, author Gregg Gordon says, “Companies that practice Lean rely on their employees who know the process best to identify unproductive activities and replace them with productive ones. This additional productive time results in higher output with the same pace of production using the same capital expenditures.”

Gordon’s analysis explains why profits have soared without noticeable impact on the unemployment rate. In Lean Labor: A Survival Guide for Companies Facing Global Competition, Gordon explains how an organization can use Lean techniques to understand, quantify, and manage labor costs and realize the benefits of Lean in performance management: lower costs, higher quality, and faster cycle times.

Here’s a quick look at examples of Lean Labor applied to the seven wastes of Lean:

• Transport: unnecessary movement of people
• Inventory: more people than required to do the job
• Motion: manual processes that could be automated
• Waiting: too few skills or too little experience to efficiently perform a process
• Overproduction: using a person who is too highly skilled for a job; providing too much information, causing the worker to sift through it to find what he/she needs
• Over-processing: entering data multiple times into different systems
• Defects: expired or missing skills and certification that cause quality and performance issues

At a time when organizations focused on reducing costs have done so by laying people off and cutting wages, those that have implemented Lean are doing more with less by “tapping into the employees’ ability to innovate,” according to Gordon. And that helps them survive in the face of global competition.

To read more about Lean and process improvement, click on these articles:

• The Value of Lean
• The Lean/Baldrige Connection
• Go to the Gemba
• How Does Your Workforce Measure Up?
• Smart Question #1: What’s the Process?

The observation comes from Rajeev Pershawaria in “The Three Things That Employees Really Care About” (FastCompany, May 12, 2011). He describes an exercise he has facilitated in seminars with hundreds of executives around the world. In the exercise, he poses an imaginary dilemma:

“Imagine you are about to change jobs and have two competing offers. Both jobs pay roughly the same amount of money and are in the same industry. Both are at reputable companies. How will you choose between the two jobs? What factors will you consider while making your decision?”

Think about that for a minute.

What factors topped your list? The nature of your new job? The work culture? Coworkers? Future opportunities?

Pershawaria captures the executives’ responses on three blank flip charts that represent the three things people care about most. He then reveals the hidden titles:

Role
Environment
Development

He observes that “most managers think they know what motivates their direct reports, but when you ask them, they actually list things that motivate them.” To be effective at engaging people, managers need to talk regularly about the three buckets, listen to understand their preferences and aspirations, and label and link their work with their expectations. For example, before giving an assignment to a woman on your team who wants more experience in cross-border transactions, he recommends that you “talk to her and tell her (label) that you are doing so because it will give her the experience she needs, and explain (link) that it will help her in her career progression if she gains cross-border expertise.”

The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How does your workforce performance management system support high-performance work and workforce?” Based on Pershawaria’s work, an effective performance management system should design and deploy processes for managers to talk with employees about what motivates them, capture and validate that information with the employees, and label and link their work with their expectations.

To read more about employee motivation and engagement, click on these articles:

• Employee Engagement Boosts Organizational Performance
• A Culture That Values Employees
• Understanding Employee Requirements
• Employee Hierarchy of Needs
• MEDRAD: Win with Your People