Better Performance2009.10.28. // General, Technology
In 2004 I met with a large technology company in Singapore that was desperate to understand how to improve its people’s performance. A woman named Anna who headed up the learning and development team took me on a tour of the group’s purpose-built operations center. While wandering through their offices, Anna pointed out remnants of various performance improvement initiative’s they’d rolled out over the last few years. They had been trying to improve the performance of their call center and reduce a crippling 40 percent turnover rate of employees.
Four years ago, consultants told them the problem was no one could define good performance. So the organization invested substantial resources into identifying some performance indicators. They decided to track three things: the number of seconds until a call was picked up; how many calls were picked up under sixty seconds; and the number of calls that hung up before being answered. They began sharing this data widely at monthly meetings, yet this made no difference to performance, and had no impact on retention.
