Why and How to apply a Balanced Scorecard Approach to achieve the right balance between Employee & Customer Experience
For what seems like years we’ve heard and drilled into our teams “Customer Service”, “The Customer comes first”, “Do what’s right”, and lately…remember the “Customer Experience”. That’s all good and well, but did we really need a Pandemic to shine a light on what matters even before our customers? Our Employees.
Having managed multiple front-line support teams, including Service Desks and Desktop Support teams, I’m impressed with how putting in place a "Balanced" score card really has most if not all of the right ingredients factored in to help in this area. A few years ago, while I was still attending Fusion conferences, l stumbled upon a presentation done on the concept of Balanced Scorecard for the Service Desk. I was focused on incorporating the kpi’s that matter the most, giving you the best indicators of success and allowing your team to right-size performance in areas that have direct impact. While l tried to do this organically myself with my team, it wasn't as easy to gain true and steady adoption with this avenue because if's simply much messier than it needs to be. So why reinvent the wheel? There are actually many solid Balanced Scorecards that have been developed over the past few decades, and they are tried and true. So rather than try to be ‘custom", found it best to leverage what’s been developed by the experts and spend more time learning from the reports than creating them. The results are simply amazing. You see the concept of a Balanced Scorecard is very similar to a recipe. You need all the right ingredients, and you need to make sure the quantities of each are factored in and depending on your pallet (your organizations needs and culture) you adjust your weights. Through this journey, I gained the following real world lessons.
1) Engage with a trusted expert in this space. They have the benefit of having worked with different industries, company sizes, complexities, and know how to fine tune a scorecards to suit your organization.
2) Assemble the management team from your organization before starting this engagement with a vendor. Make sure they buy into the why you need this balanced scorecard, and how it will help them and the employees and ultimately the organization.
3) Share and evaluate all the metrics that you already gather, how you gather them, and how complex/consistent the process is for gathering them. This will help you decide how easy/difficult it will be to maintain the scorecard process once you’ve developed it. And sometimes you’ll find it’s too painful to deliver certain metrics or find them to be not as accurate, so you may decide to move on.
4) Evaluate the weighing of each of the 5-7 critical KPI’s together as a team- engaging in real dialogue and making it about true value (and not difficulty of achieving targets) for each metric. When this is a collective effort with managers, team leads and even technical experts, targets become much easier to achieve once implemented, especially once you’ve discovered and solved for some of the blind spots that you trip on in this exercise.
5) Put the “human” before “being” in the equation. This means really think about the people doing the work, and how the employee experience, including their engagement levels, happiness, motivation factor into the model. In these exercises I was pleasantly surprised to find out that an actual “Employee Engagement Score” was required to be included in the Balanced Scorecard, and this had to come from actually surveying employees regularly and anonymously. But other measurements like absenteeism and workload also had to be factored in, with adjustments made based on role, work shift and other things that only and intimately operating team would know to factor in.
6) Agree to go and grow, with the understanding that you aren’t aiming for perfect, just steady improvement. Don’t wait for your team to be 100% comfortable with the process, and don’t hold back in fear that the employees may go into shock because they are being measured. You’re simply looking to measure the things that matter, do it better, and more consistently/fairly, so you can bring balance and a better overall experience. But it is certainly change, so it will take having to sell this internally to both layers- the managers and the staff being managed. As long as they know and feel that tweaks will be made along the way, it’s much easier to accept. You absolutely have to be consistent in producing the Balanced Scorecard, and reviewing the data/trends regularly though, otherwise it loses traction.
7) Learn from what the Scorecard is telling you- and make constant and stead changes. One thing that became obvious early on is that there were significant workload imbalances between individuals in the same role and even on the same team. These aha! moments were a treasure and allowed us to quickly work on redistributing the load, changing shifts, and even coaching individuals around process and best practices.
It’s still really amazing to me how much of a change in culture you end up experiencing among the teams that go through this type of transformation; they go from initially dreading the change to learning what they didn’t really know, to truly embracing the methodology because it really helps them manage. This type of approach allows the managers to benefit from knowing how the team as a whole is performing, month-to-month (and eventually against prior years, same quarter, or month) as well as individuals within the team. It takes the pressure off of them from having to figure out how to be fair with the staff, applying the human element as a priority, but also being pragmatic about delivering a valuable and stable service to your business.
Another added value we discovered from these exercises, for both the Service Desk and the Desktop Support teams is that 1) they were able to know and see clearly what their “targets” are overall for the Balanced Scorecard score, 2) be able to give individuals their own targets as contributors, and 3) also see how the department/team ranked against other comparable companies in this function. What blew us away was how quickly, literally within only a few months, we began to see a steady improvement in the overall score, rank placement, and most importantly, a rise in customer satisfaction! Now why would a Balanced Scorecard yield improvements in customer satisfaction rates? Quite simply, it’s because you end up managing the right ingredients of service, increasing accountability rates, and working in a more transparent but supportive way with your staff, with the staff being the most critical ingredients in this recipe. Valuing the people aspect and even placing a high weighing factor on the employee engagement score actually forces the management team to prioritize working on supporting a happier, more engaged operation. This isn’t just thanking our employees for their hard work, or paying out bonuses, it’s listening to their needs, prioritizing having the real hard conversations around career growth and helping to plan with them, and lastly, it’s celebrating in their success (both work and personal). From this perspective the team becomes a true work family.
