Measurement

People perform as they are measured. Measurement is as much a management and communication approach as it is a yardstick. Measurement should be part and parcel of designing a strategy and preparing the business to execute it, rather than something that’s slapped on a few months down the line.

Poor measurement leads to poorer decision making which leads to poorer performance. Sometimes it’s not obvious. For example, on the face of it, when the trail of clicks links an online promotion to an uptick in sales, whether directly or so-called “assisted”, it’s tempting to assume straightforward cause and effect. But whereas simplistic measurement would attribute the revenue with the cost of the promotion, effective measurement also recognizes the contribution made by the years of activity contributing to reputation / brand building and everything else of value that precedes and supports sales.

This last bit was my two penn’orth following my chat with Rachel about her new watch. The conversation then addressed a fairly new perspective as far as we were concerned.

Despite all the innovations in information and communications technology in recent decades, the modern organization almost serves to isolate the individual from aspects of organizational life beyond their immediate domain. Regular, good old-fashioned eye-to-eye interaction and feedback is restricted to those sitting at nearby desks who, as we’ve grouped people together by function, are typically doing much the same job while being exposed to much the same environment and people.

Distilling a well-rounded picture of things from an email inbox is near impossible. Perhaps surprisingly, beyond the efforts of the internal comms team, it’s quite possible that people in large organizations are numbed to what’s happening, to what’s changing, to what’s working and what isn’t.

Modern measurement and analytics serves effectively as a form of real-time sensory feedback, digitally reconnecting the individual to the day-to-day realities.

I’ve talked about measurement enough already, so let’s get to influence…