In a past blogpost, we explained how to develop a company scorecard and corresponding scorecard measurables for your business. Developing a scorecard is one thing, but leveraging scorecard data to track company performance and improve processes is a totally different undertaking. 

Many leaders misunderstand the purpose of a scorecard and wield it in ways that are detrimental to team morale or counterproductive to company goals. But not to worry! To help you get the most out of your scorecard, we put together the five core tenets of how to use it: 

1. A scorecard should prompt questions, not answer them.  

A scorecard is meant to interrogate your understanding of companywide processes and relationships to data – it’s not just a report. Use your scorecard to dive deeper into questions about your methods and discuss what is or isn’t effective. Scorecard reviews should prompt questions like: 

• Do individual employees have the right support to hit desired numbers? 
• How effective are our policies, training programs, workflows, and processes? 
• Is this scorecard data helpful? Do these measurables provide actionable insight? 

      2.  Don’t use your scorecard as a measuring stick for individual employee performance. 

Scorecard data isn’t necessarily a reflection of individual employee value or performance. Your scorecard is a tool for facilitating discussions about individual, departmental, and/or companywide developments. It’s possible that some of these discussions may require evaluation of performance, but this should never be the goal or intent of a discussion. 

      3. Assign individual employees at least one measurable. 

Measurables affect other measurables. This is part of why a scorecard is so good at illustrating the impact of individual roles and departments on a company as a whole. For example, a content producer might have a number of new pieces of content measurable –which would directly impact a marketing director’s number of content downloads measurable. If every individual employee has at least one measurable, it encourages everyone to be accountable to one another and motivates them to work toward hitting desired numbers. 

     4. Identify the origin of processes to better understand scorecard data.  

This requires a bit of reverse-engineering. If your scorecard doesn’t reflect desired numbers, map out the processes of problematic measurables and identify the origins of those processes. For example, you will need to backtrack the lead generation process for a number of leads measurable. During this exercise, you might discover things like: 

• This measurable is too high-level for the owner (a number of phone calls or emails measurablemight be more appropriate) and should be changed or reassigned to a different employee 
• The owner hasn’t been provided the right tools or technologies to carry out role responsibilities 
• Your company’s lead generation process is flawed or inefficient

      5. Adjust your scorecard to reflect changes in company priorities. 

Scorecard data will become more or less useful to your leadership team depending on company needs. If priorities change, you must adjust your scorecard and measurables to reflect those changes. This might mean adding or removing specific measurables, reassigning measurables to different employees, or altering the scorecard data collection process to improve accuracy or frequency of reviews.  

Still a little lost? We can help! Chat with us about your operational priorities and we can help you develop both a company scorecard and a scorecard review process to keep your business on track.