Today’s breakthrough? Scorecards. Yeah I said it. We’re done. That’s it. Don’t you know what scorecards are? No you probably don’t know what scorecards are, but I’m going to tell you right now. They are life and business changing.
Scorecards are a document that you put up that shares not only the KPIs of each employee, it also shares the skills and the competencies that that individual needs.
An example of skills and competencies: If I I’m going to list the skills and competencies of somebody that’s going to answer my phone one of them is happiness. They have to be really happy or excited people. But let’s say they’re not. If the scorecard ranks that from 1-5, then they are a 3. That doesn’t mean I get rid of them, but we can them improve in that area.
Just like in baseball, or anytime you keep score, scorecards allow me to not only keep score, but it helps me help them improve. The other cool thing about a scorecard is it takes away job descriptions or job duties. Now I know what happens, it happened to me year after year until I figured this out.
What happened is I came into the office and an employee says “I’m done, I’m leaving, I’m gone.” Then you have to repeat the job description and all the duties, trying to remember everything, to their replacement. But when you have scorecards, it’s really simple. You just take that scorecard to someone else and hand them the person who is leaving’s scorecard, so they can run two scorecards until you find a permanent replacement.
Let’s rewind a little bit. What’s this scorecard? The scorecard is the life of the employee. I bet every one of your employees has a KPI, right? Every one. Even the warehouse employees. Well if not, why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they be held to a key performance that’s on a written document that’s something we both agree on? Why wouldn’t you have a list of skills and competencies for each position and scorecard that can help that employee improve?
You want to have a scorecard for every position in your business, and sometimes employees will have two or three scorecards. They could have a team leader scorecard for a customer service department and also facilitating the hiring events and all the functions of hiring could be another scorecard.
Today’s challenge is two parts:
- Make a list of all the scorecards you need in your business.
- Then, get to work and start to create them.
Scorecards will give you a life and also protect you from ever being held hostage. It will make your company much more efficient and profitable. When you start defining and developing these you will find out you have some wrong people sitting in the wrong seat doing the wrong job. The other thing you will find out is that people can do more than they say they can do, a lot of times they just don’t ask for it but they want it.
I’m wishing you a better than “scorecard” day,
Mike Agugliaro, Business Ninja
