Measuring Workplace Work Ethics

¶ … Management of Employee Effort The aspect of employee performance that I am convinced is the most difficult to measure is effort. Quite simply, it is difficult to ascertain whether or not an employee is putting forth genuine effort, enthusiasm, and verve in attaining goals related to business objectives. Still, it is critical to be able to measure employee effort because doing so can greatly inform those aforementioned processes.

For instance, if an organization were able to ascertain that its employees were considerably exerting themselves to reach goals and were still not able to do so, it could consider possible solutions related to technology or its processes that needed refinement or replacement. Consequently, it seems fairly obvious that organizations should deploy various measures of strategic control or controlling to gauge employee effort and proceed accordingly.

One of the initial steps for any sort of controlling efforts is to set standards in the forms of goals or objectives that employees should meet. In attempting to determine employee effort, it is critical to ensure that one does not measure how effectively the employee attains business objectives, but rather some facet of those objectives which can reveal how much effort an employee is putting in to achieving those business objectives.

One of the best ways to fulfill this aspect of controlling, then, is to set quotas that are demonstrative of efforts. Therefore, for sales representatives, for instance, one should mandate a required number of leads that they should generate each week or perhaps even daily. Converting those leads will not be measured initially. However, determining the number of leads that a sales representative can get will help reveal how much effort he or she is putting in to actually converting those leads.

The next step for implementing controlling mechanisms is to develop measures to evaluate or monitor the attainment of the aforementioned quota. Ideally, one should do so in a quantifiable method to ascertain how much effort and employee is putting into getting leads. For instance, there should be an objective method to denote exactly how many times during a workday or during the week an employee attempted to contact potential customers. Quantifiable records could include the number of emails sent, or possibly even the number of emails received.

Similarly, organizations could attempt to keep track of phone calls employees made, messages left, or other means that indicate that an employee was attempting to initiate contact with a customer in order to procure a lead and eventually. The email method is advantages because it would not take much to develop this measure and simply analyze an employee's work email. Additionally, the strategic control would involve a comparison between the actual quantifiable attempts an employee made vs. that which is mandated by the quota.

Utilizing a quantifiable methodology for both of these measures is important because it provides a ready means.