Over the course of 15 million employee interviews, research has proven that perhaps THE best driver of high performance is when employees have clear expectations. However, performane mangement can get convoluted in a hurry. With good intentions, too many companies make their performance management systems overly complicated, diluting any positive benefit they might have gained.
For this post, I'm going to focus specifically on customer service roles. Here is what I've seen to be the world-class standard:
An employee is paid a significant amount (enough to influence behavior), based on simple metrics that they psychologically own, and have been statistically proven to link to business outcomes; and as that employee models those behaviors repeatedly creating positive customer interactions, real increases in customer loyalty can be measured, and as loyalty increases, customers spend more, stay longer and encourage their friends to do the same.
That sounds complicated, but if you break it down into pieces it becomes easier to execute.
Step 1: ensure that at least 40% of employee's pay is performance based
Step 2: show employees evidence that the metrics they are judged on have a clear link to the performance of the company
Step 3: ensure that employees can in fact influence those metrics through certain behaviors, and provide tools, training and coaching to embed those behaviors
Step 4: validate by measuring loyalty trends and linking loyalty back to the performance of the company
Step 5: remove organizational barriers that prevent employees from executing this strategy, and correct any systemic business model conflicts that lead to dissatisfied customers
There... wasn't that easy?
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