Scorecard Best Practices

Aligning Measures and Employees to Organizational Goals

Another great de‐motivator for employees is the use of measures unrelated to the strategy of the organization. When measures used to evaluate performance do not relate to strategy, employees have the impression that their efforts are not related to the strategy and, therefore, they are not important to the company—a despondent feeling, to be sure.

Most participants in the SHAPs study have a strong link between their scorecards, performance measures, and the organization's goal‐setting process. A large majority of those surveyed stated that the measures on their scorecards are the same ones on which annual and longer‐term goals (or objectives) are set during the planning process, while only 8 percent said that they were not. The stronger the agreement with the statement, the more likely the organization was to agree that it had achieved significant benefits from its scorecard system.

One respondent, a government defense agency, added, “To date, the networking between bases and sharing of actions and measurements [on their scorecards] to achieve the vision (most did not even know our mission/vision) has made this effort a huge success already.”

A semiconductor manufacturer observed, “Employees use their organization's scorecards to identify their personal job related goals in order to align their goals to the organizational goals.” This linkage resulted in the following benefit: “The scorecard system has facilitated the effective ...