Small Business Staff Performance Standards: You Can't Measure Progress Without Them.

All the gurus emphasise the importance of setting clear, measurable goals. And that's good. But few mention performance standards that tell you how well you're progressing towards meeting these goals. Without performance standards neither you nor your employees will be able to accurately measure progress. That's one of the reasons that they're so important.

Know How Well You're Doing. Imagine a sports game without a scoreboard. No one: players, coaches, officials, spectators would know how the game was progressing. Players and coaches wouldn't know whether to try harder, slacken off, intensify their efforts or change the game plan. They wouldn't know how to deploy players for best results or match up opposition players for maximum advantage.

And How Well They're Doing. Without a scoreboard you could rely only on voice contacts to receive information about the state of the game. You wouldn't know how the opposition was doing either. And you'd have no real idea whether the information from the voice contacts was worthwhile or useless. In effect, players would be "playing blind" as far as their progress was concerned.

The Sports Arena and The Workplace. Can you imagine a professional sportsground without a scoreboard. Coaches, officials, players and spectators all look at it from time to time. But we don't demand a scoreboard telling us about workplace performance.

If we went employees to achieve work goals successfully, we need a system to tell them how well - or otherwise - they're doing. Employees don't want to be uninformed. They want to monitor their own progress.

We set work goals routinely but don't set standards to tell us how well we're progressing towards them. In a sports arena this would be seen as just plain stupid.

What Performance Standards Can Do For You. Performance Standards measure how well you're progressing towards your goals. They also enable you to measure goal achievement precisely. But they do more

they provide intermediate goals to motivate employees

they reinforce the importance of measurement of progress towards goals

they enable employees to assess their own progress

they allow revision of tactics for goal achievement

they force managers to be precise and specific about what they're trying to achieve

they improve clarity of purpose for all concerned

they facilitate evaluation of performance in a consistent manner

they highlight circumstances that enhance or inhibit goal achievement

Conclusion. If you don't have professional performance standards, not only will you be unable to decide whether you've reached your goal, you won't be able to measure progress either. You'll have no precise way of knowing whether you've arrived either.