A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that pointed out the benefits of management by walking around can be achieved without actually leaving your desk. Some examples are as follows: Management can mimic the shopping experience of a prospective customer by visiting a Web site and trying to find/buy a particular product. It’s…
For many years, I’ve argued that performance management is not just limited to finance but instead has many flavors, including workforce, operational, and IT performance management. Most people now seem to agree and there’s even talk of pervasive performance management. However, a critical analysis of the current situation suggests that marketing organizations are still early on…
Paying new employees to quit sounds counter-intuitive but it could the key to high-performance organization. In “Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit – And You Should Too,” Bill Taylor explains… When Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People…
One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
You can accomplish your management by walking around goals without actually walking around. The walking (or wandering) around was never the point. As I said in my initial 2006 post, For Hewlett and Packard, managing by walking around (MBWA) was a way to get everyone on the same page; what they believed was the secret…
If you’re a performance management practitioner, you already know metrics should have both an actual and a target value. Actual is the current value of a metric while target is the value you would like it to be. (NB: I strongly prefer using the word target instead of goal because the latter can easily be…
I often use call centers as my default example when describing how better objectives and metrics can help improve performance. It’s not that performance in call centers is always poor. It’s just that executive management often regards the call center as nothing more than required overhead that burden the bottom line. Call center sometimes unwittingly…
After my posting on call centers, I received an email from a reader submitting his own recent experience with a call center. The story is so funny – and such a classic example of lack of alignment – that, with the reader’s permission, I decided to share it with you. I edited the email for…
If you’ve heard me give a performance management presentation, you know one of my favorite topics is the pursuit of improved performance in call centers. When I first started using them as my prototypical example several years ago, organizations were in the midst of moving call centers offshore. Less expensive human agents and AI-based electronic agents…
I’ve been on the road for the last two weeks so it’s only in the last couple of days that I’ve been able to catch up with some of the items on my to-do list. This morning I listened to a Web seminar that provided a three-step method for moving from basic measures to key performance…