Employee Experience Design

12Metrics That Matter Taking the Pulse of Your Organization

We've already discussed how some people will rush into a project and not follow the discipline of the Double Diamond for two reasons—because they're unaware of it, or because they're busy and want to get to a quick result.

The same thing happens with metrics. It's common to hear:

• “Too much analysis paralysis … let's get on with it!”
• “I've been in this business a very long time and trust me—I know what success looks like.”
• “The only metrics that really matter are money in the bank and share price.”

Those are all excuses for not measuring. The only thing worse is measuring progress using the typical annual engagement survey. Why is it worse? Because it's usually done so poorly that it yields no useful information, but the act of doing it gives people a false sense of accomplishment. In Chapter 2, we described how annual surveys are a snapshot in time, but organizations change by the day.  That's just one of the problems with them.

In a moment, you'll get a list you can use to think through and gauge the quality of any survey you do—or any measurements you take, for that matter. In fact, the insights in this chapter by themselves can be transformative to your organization—if you choose to take action on them.

Before we go any deeper, let's clear up the difference between metrics and measurements. A metric is the dimension we want to focus on, and a measurement is a data point. Temperature is the metric or dimension, ...