Quality practice and balanced scorecard approach at USPS

Balanced Scorecard Evaluation

The Voice of the Employee focused on safety and poor employee relations. This falls under the Learning and Growth category of the balanced scorecard. It evaluates the correct level of expertise with each employee, employee turnover, job satisfaction, and training (McCarthy, 2008). The balanced scorecard measures the top down strategy of the company's mission statement and strategy (Kaplan, 2007). From the mission and strategy of USPS, the employees could be measured on current success, how improvement could be made, and future success, how improvement could continue to improve in the future. This entails all employees across the organization and evaluates performance gaps. Workplace environment addressed safety measured against OSHA and employee satisfaction measured by annual surveys and tracked monthly by units.

The Voice of Business was separated into two areas, productivity measure and revenue measure. This evaluated the internal business process of the number of activities per function, duplicate activities across functions, process alignment, process bottlenecks, and process automation. Better productivity would increase the revenue in the process in respect to increasing revenue and reducing waste in employee time to perform the function.

The Voice of the Customer focused on delivery systems to the customer, how service was delivered to the customer. The measure was customer satisfaction in service delivery. Each aspect was continually measured for improvement and how the processes could continue to improve. By improving human capital, operational efficiency was improved. By improving operational efficiency, customer satisfaction was improved. With all the improvements financial stability was improved for the organization overall.

Service delivery could add address changes to the measurements. Where some areas take weeks to change an address, this could be another area with service delivery. Where the categories are all interdependent of each other, it would entail evaluation of employees, training, business processes for improvement, and service delivery in the way the service gets delivered.

Another service delivery area that could be added in is designation of lanes for specific services during holiday busy times. For example, if a lane is set up just for buying stamps and package pick up, these customers would not have to wait in line as long by standing behind other customers trying to mail holiday packages. It could improve efficiency in the way customers receive services.

The balanced score card can improve employee satisfaction, efficiency in operations, delivery of services or goods, and improve financial stability of the organization. It is also designed for continued improvement to create future success by concentrating on the critical areas of the business. The management strategy balanced with the mission and company strategy is a design that could change as changes require the strategy of the company to change with external environmental factors.

There are pitfalls if the balanced scorecard is not followed correctly (Davies). The design must have a well-developed and defined clear strategy that includes a link between strategy and budget creation. Key steps and challenges must be adequately worked out and proven linkage between measures and outcomes be created. The measures chosen must be able to deliver the desired results. All departments need to be involved to identify appropriate measures, especially the ones who deal directly with the customer. The measures should be internally and externally balanced where one measure does not conflict with another. Measures should be limited to ensure they are achievable.