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Not sure when to reward employees? Scorecards are a great way to keep track of success

There’s a growing group of business leaders who will look you right in the eye and laugh at you if you tell them that today’s employees are disengaged. This group of professionals has never had the problem, so what’s their secret to employee engagement?

It’s so simple you might not believe it: these executives keep employee scorecards. Scorecards tell you when to reward employees for a job well done. Here’s why you should be using this unique strategy in your office:

Alignment

You already have a job description for each employee. That’s a helpful first step, but it needs to be a bigger process: increasing the size of the employees’ footprint is your goal.

Align their performance expectations with company goals. Is your current focus to make your company a friendlier place to do business? It isn’t just about interacting with customers – this notion should hold true on a colleague-to-colleague basis throughout the office as well.

Even employees tucked away in places like the accounting department can contribute to these goals. Each member of your team should work toward developing better relationships with their own set of coworkers AND customers. But do they (and you) even know if they are succeeding at it?

Return on Investment

Companies that push their strategic vision out of the executive offices and all the way down to the front lines are winning a battle on two fronts:

1. They’re becoming more successful

2. They’re turning employees into advocates

This is possible because employees are rewarded for their efforts. They see a direct correlation between their actions and the benefits to the company. It’s a simple, cause-and-effect equation.

The scorecard describes the conditions that will exist after an employee does their job. Targets and objectives create quantifiable measures.

The elements of a scorecard

There’s always a reason to keep score. In this case, it’s because a business wants to find balance. What’s necessary to align the actions of employees with a company’s vision and strategy? Employee scorecards help to track that performance. Utilize these elements:

• Strategy map: It sums up the company’s strategic plan in a way that makes it pertinent to the employee
• Perspectives: This section slices the company up into groups and helps detail the business goals of each group
• Objectives: These define the company’s high-level goals
• Measures: How does the organization track progress towards the objectives?
• Targets: What are the goals when setting a target performance level?
• Initiatives: What specific projects or actions does the employee have to do to achieve these targets?

Breaking it down

A company’s measurements of success are a cumulative result of everyone’s progress (or lack thereof). When all employees see the big picture, they understand what their individual contributions can do. A scorecard helps them track and measure those contributions.

Easy to set up

A simple employee scorecard can have as few as just four main areas:

• The financial perspective: What can an employee do to help increase business revenue? It’s got to be specific. The worker has to agree they are capable of doing it.
• The business process perspective: What can an employee do to help increase internal efficiency?
• The customer perspective: What can an employee do to increase customer satisfaction? The key is to remember that your company has many sets of customers. This includes coworkers.
• The learning and growth perspective: What can an employee do to improve their skills and knowledge?

Linking measures to rewards

With employee scorecards, you create a clear direction with specific actions. Employees know whether they’ve accomplished them or not. There’s no more guessing.

When you link rewards to these scorecards, workers have a constant way of checking their progress. They don’t waste time and energy on things that aren’t important to the company.

Employee engagement is something that must be constantly tended to and worked on. If you’re company is struggling to track performance, and if you think the scorecard rewards program is as awesome as we do, it’s time to try CrewHu. Contact us today to get started!