In recent times, managing teams has become progressively more challenging.  It is a well known fact that keeping people focussed and motivated in achieving an organisation’s objectives is a “must” in corporate survival. Happy and motivated employees will help drive the achievement of the organisation’s strategy.

In the course of the year, employee motivation and focus are often derailed by organizational changes, people attrition, etc. We have all experienced this as businesses respond to external factors such as changes in competitor strategy and behaviours and are forced to make difficult decisions that can impact employee morale.

Most organizations try to align or allocate an individual's KPIs in accordance with the organisation’s strategy. Unfortunately, there have always been challenges in this process with employees not fully aware of the “organisation’s big picture” and their KPIs link to it. Other challenges include measurement criteria not set to the appropriate level, i.e. difficulty in transforming manager’s KPI to individual employee’s KPI.

What follows is a case study where the management team in a large organisation, piloted a new programme: “Strategic Management with Numbers”. The objective of this programme was to align organisational objectives and individual’s KPIs. The aim was to help each employee recognize that achievement of their individual objectives advanced the organisation’s overall objectives.

As background, the department which undertook the initiative comprises of around forty individuals and is led by a General Manager. It is part of a division that comprises over a thousand employees while the department itself is organized into four teams, each lead by an Executive Manager.

Diagram 1: Case Study’s Organisation Chart

The initiative undertook the following steps:

1. Generating ideas via workshop
2. Setting Team KPI
3. Tracking Team KPI
4. Reinforcing strengths

1-Generating ideas via workshop

Initial workshop was held with members of the department to determine a set of objectives that they would like to achieve. Factors that determined this included the employee’s individual career development plans, work that interested them, cross team development opportunities. At the end of the session, the management team prioritised and finalised the yearly objectives.

2-Setting Team KPI

After the workload prioritisation, each team drew up their work plan with reference to the department’s objectives. Teams were encouraged to come up with a minimum of five objectives. Each team manager sat down with their respective teams to produce the following:

• Team contribution for each set of objectives. For example:

The team KPI was used to develop each individual’s career development plan for the year with timelines:

3-Tracking success

Upon the completion of each step, a scorecard was created for each team and combined to provide a divisional view. The scorecard that was developed incorporated “people elements” for employee motivations. Examples for people elements included “Workplace surveys that show employee satisfaction” and “Employee retention”. Each criteria in the scorecard is measured against a target and is compared monthly to identify variances- favourable and unfavourable.

The example below shows sample KPI of the entire department. It incorporates “people related” measures such as Workplace Survey Score and Team Retention. As explained earlier, by linking the overall strategy to the respective team’s KPI it will improve the “people related” measures.

Process Maturity KPI provides another example, and was broken down from the Department KPI to the three team’s individual KPI for tracking purposes. The Reporting and Analytics team was required to perform analytics on each of the ITIL processes in order to recommend ways of improving each of them. The Process Leaders were responsible for prioritising each of the recommendations in order to implement and integrate them into the process. The Enablement team was responsible for “enhancing” the tool in order to support the maturity of the processes as automation is able to improve the maturity of the process.

Team: Department KPI

Team: Reporting and Analytics

Team: Process Leaders

Team: Enablement

4-Reinforcement

The above scorecard was reviewed at the monthly team meeting. Success in each criterion is celebrated and missed targets are discussed. In the example shown above, the enhancement prioritisation process was not completed by the Q1 target given there were challenges in engaging key stakeholders for approval. As a result, work priorities are reallocated in order to achieve the target in the coming months while keeping employees satisfied and motivated.  

The team tracks all people related KPI to ensure that the respective employees are motivated and happy. Whilst work is reprioritised, the department is also able to track and ensure that employee morale is not affected. Constant reprioritisation may create “unhappy workers” as they may be stretched and unable to focus on their annual objectives. However, with the People KPI tracked, the department is able to ensure that work objectives are met while keeping employees enthusiastic in going to work!

In conclusion, by linking the department’s overall strategy to the team’s strategy, employee’s motivation was uplifted. Motivated employees are better able to contribute to organizational outcomes and in the case described above, the attrition rate was reduced to only 20% in comparison with the 50% attrition in the previous financial year!