All Posts Tagged With: "measurement"
Workforce Well-Being
The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that get at the well-being of your workforce, including questions about employee satisfaction and health and the support you provide through services and benefits. Scientists at Gallup have been studying workforce well-being for more than 50 years. Two of these scientists wrote a book about it called Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.
According to Gallup’s research, there are universal elements of well-being that differentiate thriving from struggling. They have grouped them in five categories:
- Career Well-Being: How you occupy your time or how much you like what you do every day.
- Social Well-Being: Having strong relationships and love in your life.
- Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life.
- Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done.
- Community Well-Being: A sense of engagement with your community.
According to the book’s authors, when these factors are fully realized, people thrive.
An article on the Gallup Management Journal (click here) explains why this matters. Most of us believe that happy and healthy people get sick less often than miserable people. According to Gallup’s data, workers with the lowest well-being scores cost their companies $28,800 a year in lost productivity from sick days. In contrast, workers with the highest well-being scores cost their companies just $840 dollars.
That’s an astounding discrepancy! The data suggest that it is worth an organization’s time and money to improve their workforce well-being. That means paying attention to all five elements.
- Career Well-Being: Engage your employees. Gallup found a strong correlation between employee engagement and well-being.
- Social Well-Being:…
Making Better Decisions, Faster
The Baldrige Criteria devote one Item to how you manage information, knowledge, and information technology. The goal is to make data and information accurate, reliable, timely, secure, confidential, and available to the people who need it, when they need it.
In “How Do You Speed Up Information Delivery?” (HBR, May 26, 2010), Tom Davenport addresses the need for speed in information delivery. He identifies several technical advances that are accelerating this including: (1) storing information in memory rather than on a hard drive for faster retrieval and manipulation; (2) using new forms of databases for faster data retrieval and analysis; and, (3) faster hardware and easier-to-use software the make data analysis easier.
This, he notes, “is the relatively easy part.” Process, behavior, and management change are tougher. The first step is to identify what information really needs to be delivered more quickly. Not all information is critical. Prioritizing will help focus resources on the greatest need.
Davenport points out that managers want information when they want it, which is not necessarily when they get it. For that reason, it’s often better to make information available for online access (pull) rather than issuing reports (push).
The next step is to have executives work with analysts “to identify what information is most needed quickly, and then to create alerts, query and reporting formats, and analyses that truly inform decisions.”
The final step, according to Davenport, is to make decisions faster. This is the whole reason to speed up information delivery in the first place: To make better, more…
1Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow to Develop a Balanced Scorecard
Organizations that want to get a better handle on how they are doing in the areas most important to their success often decide to develop a Balanced Scorecard. Here are four typical stages of development.
Stage 1: Enlightenment. Senior executives need to believe that the path to solid, long-term success requires knowledge of: (a) customer requirements and how to meet them; (b) employee requirements in order to reduce turnover, improve processes, and provide better service; and (c) operational processes and costs to discover how to become faster and more flexible. With this realization, leaders seek measurements that will tell them how the company is doing in each of these areas. Better yet, they want a measurement system that shows the connection between these vital areas. They are enlightened. The need for a Balanced Scorecard grows.
Stage 2: Identification. The organization initiates a system-wide effort to identify existing measures and to create needed measures where none exist. It begins to track performance on these measures, to report progress to employees, and to reward them for meeting performance goals.
Stage 3: Refinement. The reaction to the measurements, progress, reports, and rewards suggests that people respond to what is measured. This leads to greater refinement of the measures. For example, since daily performance measures receive more attention than annual customer surveys, leadership may decide it should have more frequent customer measures and establish interim performance indicators tied to the less frequent surveys.
Stage 4: Integrated Analysis. The organization’s measurement system is linked to the organization’s vision with…
11May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBuilding a Company on Baldrige
Baldrige stories turn up in unlikely places, like the article, “Striving for quality has real payoffs,” on Computerworld (April 20, 2010). Al Kuebler describes his experiences getting hired as the CIO for a start-up business that was organized, built, and operated according to the Baldrige model.
During his job interview, Kuebler learned that efficient IT service delivery would be required, but that the most important measure of IT performance would be ensuring that every business function had the information it needed to make better, faster decisions for the customer.
Kuebler started his work on this issue where he needed to start: with his customers. His IT team met with each business component to establish their business needs. They then “created a diagram of the overall flow of essential information for the entire business and each component within it.” They verified their diagram with each business unit before presenting it to senior management.
This dialogue was enlightening. “I knew precisely, for the first time in my career, how the business made its profit and in what ways the IT function’s performance was a factor in generating client satisfaction, growth, and profitability,” wrote Kuebler.
The company Kuebler helped launch was AT&T Universal Card Services, which won the Baldrige Award in 1992. To my knowledge, it’s the only organization that was built from the start on the Baldrige model and that went on to win the Award. If I remember correctly, it received the Award just three years after the company was formed. A few years later, a…
22Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCommunicating Performance on Key Measures
Wainwright Industries manages by fact. One visit to Mission Control and you believe it.
Wainwright dedicates one conference room at its headquarters in St. Peters, Missouri, to displaying the information and analysis that drives its award-winning continuous improvement efforts. It calls the room Mission Control.
The walls display a plethora of charts and graphs, including trends for quality and performance indicators and, for each customer, monthly satisfaction index scores, trends for quality measures, stretch targets for exceeding customer expectations, and weekly customer feedback reports.
Wainwright developed five key strategic indicator categories from its strategic business planning process: safety, internal and external customer satisfaction, Six Sigma quality, and business performance. “We focus on safety first and making money last,” says plant manager Mike Simms. And the focus has paid off. “We went from $100,000 in Workers Compensation claims in 1991 to zero in 1994,” Simms said, “and our number of recordable accidents dropped from 66 to 12.” At the same time, putting business performance last did not mean it suffered. Over the same time period, Wainwright’s gross profit as a percent of sales jumped from 8.7% to 14.2%.
Mission Control displays key quality indicators for each of the five categories, all of which link to the company’s mission, vision, values, and objectives. The Mission Control indicators are recordable accidents, associate suggestion rate, internal and external customer satisfaction, internal parts per million, sales, and net income. Trends are updated and reviewed regularly. “I go into Mission Control every day,” said Don Wainwright, chairman and chief executive…
23Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWho Are a High School’s Customers?
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor described the value of analyzing data for high school educators. (“Numbers Game Grows in Education, Healthcare,” March 4, 2010–no link available). The article uses the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (CalPASS) as an example of how “data-driven discoveries are helping to revitalize educators’ efforts.”
CalPASS has a database of more than 355 million student records from kindergarten through college. It uses business intelligence software to analyze the data and provides reports on its findings.
One study found that students who stopped taking English courses after 10th grade required the same level of remediation in community college as students who continued to take advanced English courses through 12th grade. Teachers naturally wondered how this could be true, which caused them to examine the differences between what they were teaching and the expectations of community colleges. According to Brad Phillips, executive director of CalPASS, “educators learned that high-school courses emphasized literature, while community-college courses covered writing and grammar, and four-year colleges emphasized analysis and argumentation. As a result, officials changed high-school teaching to create better alignment.”
From a Baldrige perspective, this means that high school teachers identified community colleges and four-year colleges as their customers, identified their customers’ requirements, and changed their curricula to better meet those requirements.
That’s an excellent start but I’m not sure it will solve the bigger problem, which is preparing high school students to succeed in life. The changes high school officials made should help their students be better prepared for college, but are…
15Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement’s Five Deadly Diseases
W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.
Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.
The five deadly diseases are:
- Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.
- Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.
- Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and unjust system that annihilates long-term planning and teamwork. People work in fear. As Deming said, rewarding performance sounds great but it can’t be done.
- Mobility of management. It takes a long time to understand how a company works. Annual performance ratings encourage management mobility, which leaves too few people who really understand…
