Measuring Work Performance: Metrics vs Impact

Having played a couple of different roles across my history of work, I've found out that there are roles that have direct metrics attached with which your output and performance can be measured. Other roles can be ambiguous to measure. In all, managers have need to quantify the effect each team member has/is having towards the cumulative goal of the institution being served. Unfortunately, there's no single fit that covers the diversity of work and demands across the ever evolving work places we find ourselves in.

Regardless, we can consider measuring work in two ways:

• Metrics
• Impact

METRICS

This way of measuring performance often applies to team members in specialised roles defined by goals, output measurable in numbers, task completion rates, quality, etc. For results that are very obvious and often tangible, a team member's assessment can be directly qualified and quantified with little margins of error. More like, "What you see is what you get.".

IMPACT

For team members who often have roles that overlap with other roles, whose job descriptions morph to fit the current task at hand, measuring work performance can be trickly and often prone to incomplete judgements and conclusions. Considering an I.T. support officer, fixing a server issue once in a while may not seem like much. But his/her work impacts the entire organisation - either to proceed with work without interruptions or halt all work till a solution is found. With server issues not likely to recur daily, an effective I.T. support officer's work performance may be wrongly interpreted if analysed with the metrics of standardised roles. There could be statements like "I don't really know what you're doing.", "I don't see what you do.", "You don't seem to be doing anything.". Beyond the aforementioned role, there are many others that can identify with this dilemma.

With some roles having less tangible outputs, we will have to go beyond metrics and weigh the impact of work being done as well. Support roles often turn out to be reactive and proactive, while other roles are more structured. I believe we should consider more than just fundamental measures when assessing our teams to reflect what each member offers and their contribution to properly translating the vision of their institution. In all, every role is important and collectively effectual, just as they are unique and intrinsically significant.

To your success and beyond...???