Dear All,

“Effort should be rewarded and more effort put in should be rewarded more”

In doing above it is practical always to measure the subjective criteria of any particular task and payout as per measurement parameters set. Obviously in production departments the measurement criteria is very much visible either in tangible substances or intangible data etc. Therefore it is easier for anyone to design an Incentive Scheme for such jobs which entail visible and quantifiable tasks.

But, when it counts to non quantifiable jobs such as HRD Executives, Admin Personnel, Facility Staff, Welfare Officers, Counselors etc., designing of an Incentive Scheme become tedious due to the fact that most of the input variables and final output being not able to measure.

One could argue that the output could be measured by:

No of Hours

No. persons interviewed. Spoke etc.,

No. of Applications processed etc.,

No of grievances handled etc.,

But, the point is the input variables and the output of these kind of jobs have been invariably different from one week to another. Moreover the quality of work also should be measured along with the quantity which makes the job more difficult. On the other hand the service levels of these departments are very important which is some what formidable to measure.

As an example in the eyes of Admin personnel it is very comfortable to say that they have done a good job which warrants incentives for them but, in the eyes of production department the work done by Admin may be measured as a shoddy job.

Which reveals that the levels of service of that(Admin)department will depend on how the other departments look at Admin?

Can anybody tell me a way on how we could measure the service levels of above departments in order to reward the additional effort put in by the staff. Which will also helpful for everybody in this trade to design incentive schemes for personnel in Admin, HRD, Facility, Counseling, and Welfare etc.

Thanks,
Arjun

Hi Arjun,

While I am not into the active practice of such measurements, I have been aware of a few Organisations that seem to make an attempt at this. From what I have seen, I have seen the mix and match of some of these methods.

a) Working out the HR Balanced Score Card , out of the Company's Score Card and linking the same to the KPIs of the individuals. While doing so, they seem to distinguish between the "Routine" and the "value added" components of the KPIs. Needless to say, goal-setting exercise needs to attended to with complete care so that the finer nuances of the objectives are not missed out. This method may / may not be aligned with the Job Specifications of the Position the individual is occupying. If aligned, review of the Job specifications in the extant context would be an area to focus attention. In the alignment method I find that generally the tendency is to catalogue the KPIs too (with some degree of standardisation) while the "measures" would be contextual to the period of evaluation. Cataloging of the KPIs would help in evaluating those assigned similar KPIs (particualrly the weighty ones) as to how they have performed.

All this presupposes that the Appraisal process is handled well & the Appraisal method is more than 90 degrees !

b) Getting multiple feed back from the Internal Customers about the value addition of the HR Processes delivered by the HR Staff (either as part of Appraisal or independently) for the immediate term or long term, depending on the areas involved.

Of course, these are subjective but if the spread of feedback is wider then to some extent it gets firmer. For example, if it is Recruitments the quality of those recruited, retention spans, skills displayed as expected, etc would be indicative of the very nature of the Recruitment Strategy and the processes involved - both short term and long term. Similarly, Training value-addition could be both short term (skilling) or medium to long term ( depending on the Organisational strategy for Human Resources) in terms of deployment of the knowledge gained.

The Value-addition feedback would be iterative for HR Processes and if taken seriously can benefit HR community within the Organisation. If treated defensively the exercise would be futile. Objective intake and process re-design commitment would be the touchstone.

c) Measuring HR value addition along with costing of activity / benchmarking, by sticking to the core purpose of HR. For example, if it is relatively inexpensive to outsource Payroll than to process it in-house which if leads to internal Customer satisfaction, it will be a case for outsourcing with re-deploment of surpluses generated. In other words, enabling HR to focus itself on key dimensions of HRM and measuring individual value addition expected to the whole, in a Gestalt approach. Merely going by Costs may not help as Users may end up with shoddy services.

Well, these are a few I could think of. There may be many other efficient methods and I hope to learn them from our community.

Prof. Tandon