Effort versus result

Some key performance indicators (KPIs) measure effort.

How many hours did you work? How many sales calls did you book? How many projects did you finish?

Other KPIs measure results.

How much profit did we make? How satisfied are our customers? How happy are our workers?

Many owners and managers spend a lot of time trying to find the correlation between effort and results (or trying to impose what they think the correlation is).

Then they overemphasize effort—hours worked, calls made, projects finished—because those can be “managed.”

Yet the correlations rarely hold. More hours at your desk produce diminishing returns. Your first sales call of the day always goes better than your last. The project you carefully finished earlier in the week will please the customer much more than the one you rushed out before the weekend.

I don’t mean effort doesn’t matter. It does.

But we usually don’t measure—or manage—what we aim to achieve.

So let me know…

How are you measuring effort in your company?

How are you measuring results in your company?

Are you managing effort, or are you managing results?

Hit REPLY and tell me about it!