Staff Management: Two Questions You Must Ask For Sound Staff Performance

Introduction

Staff management and staff performance: how many words have you read about these two topics? No matter how much you’ve read, did you know this? You can get to the heart of the issue with just two short, simple questions.

The Two Questions

1. What is the exact result you want from your staff?
2. How will you know they’ve achieved the result you want?

I’ll repeat them in plain terms. What do you want from them? How will they know they’re successful?

Why These Two Questions?

It’s quite simple. You must decide exactly what you expect from your employees. If you don’t know exactly what you expect, you can’t tell them. If they don’t know exactly what you want, they can’t provide it. You can’t develop effective systems to get what you want. Everybody loses. Knowing exactly what you expect is good, it’s not enough. You must know how you’ll measure success. And you must pass that on to your staff as well.

“Exactly” Means Just That

Its not enough to say “process all phone orders quickly, accurately and on time”. You must define “quickly”, “accurately” and “on time”. And you must add what resources you’ll provide to enable staff to do what you want. This is a crucial part of your job as manager. You must say “process all phone orders within 30 minutes of receiving them using the InStock computer system so that the customer receives the order in full within 8 hours of the original phone call”.  You could break that down in greater detail if you believe it to be appropriate. Broad generalizations have no place in stated goals.

Measurement

It’s one thing to state exactly what you want. It’s another to know precisely how you’ll measure success.  For instance, using the example above you might say

• By 4.30 pm each day all phone orders received before midday have been sent to dispatch
• Customers notified of out of stock items and resupply arranged
• No customer complaints regarding incomplete orders or orders not delivered within the 8 hour supply deadline.

These are merely a start. You could spell out the standards in much greater detail if it suited your business.

Goals and Measurement

The combination of goals and measures of how you’ll know they’re achieved constitute performance standards. Performance standards are the absolute lynchpin of employee performance. You say exactly what you want and how you’ll measure it. Staff know what they need to achieve and how their work will be measured. That’s a potent combination for successful on job performance.

The Big Payoff

The great payoff goes even further. Follow this simple method and both you and your employees will know “how they’re going” at least weekly and maybe even daily. You’ll also have a simple and effective way to measure where mistakes occur. And by comparing systems, staff will understand how their work affects others in the company. They’ll be able to renegotiate roles and goals with colleagues to give you what you want. They’re good results for asking only two questions.

“But Leon …”

I can hear some of you saying “But Leon, I’ve told them a thousand times. They know what I want. I don’t need to tell them. They just don’t do it”. If that’s the case, ask your staff to tell you exactly what they believe you expect. You may be surprised.

Don’t make the mistake of writing elaborate procedures. Concentrate on stating specifically what performance you expect and how you’ll measure it.

Conclusion

Some management gurus and experts seem determined to complicate the whole business of managing employees. To some extent, they’re correct. But we should take care when following their words of wisdom. It’s easy to forget the simple techniques that when used professionally, will provide massive returns for your efforts. It’s yet another example of another, rarely spoken management reality: the quality of the answers you get is a direct result of the quality of the questions you ask.