KPIs. We talk about them all the time. What is our organizational vision? Our objective? How do we identify and track KPIs that push our organization forward? We spend time gaining executive alignment and developing communication plans. We iterate the data visualizations and the status reports. We do our due diligence to design robust, meaningful, quantitative measures that provide objective evidence of performance.
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We do all this effort at the organizational level. But what about at the team level? What are the individual teams tracking to help them push forward and quantify their progress? Tracking team KPIs deserves the same amount of attention given to organizational KPIs.
# Why you should create team-level KPIs
Often, I have joined new projects and been impressed with the clarity around organizational KPIs. Executives put in the effort to rally their organizations around KPIs. But when I join the teams, the people on the ground doing the work, I see a complete absence of metrics that help drive their day-to-day efforts. The teams work hard, make improvements, and then must guess how their performance feeds into the larger picture. These teams are missing their own objective ways to track the work they are touching daily.
Organizational KPIs are fundamental to building direction and vision, but by measuring progress at a smaller scale, you can find a higher level of engagement across the team and a greater connection to the larger vision.
Through my experiences, finding team-level KPIs that the team can connect to drives clarity and motivation. In almost every industry, there is untapped data waiting to be leveraged into something useful for the team. Sometimes, I have been able to take existing work and generate visuals to share with the team. In other experiences, I have worked with the team to brainstorm metrics they wish they could see. We have opened the floor for individuals to share how they are motivated, and often, these metrics become the most interesting to engage with.
Finding, tracking, and sharing metrics that the team connects with provides tangibility. Here are three real-world examples that illustrate how you can start creating team-level KPIs and the immediate impact they can have.
# 1. Connecting a Team to Org-KPIs by Transforming Existing Data
The Background: While working with a team of recruiters in talent acquisition, it became clear that they were highly aware of the organization’s recruiting targets. Each recruiter could spout the quarterly numbers and fiscal year targets with surprising ease. When I dug a little deeper though, they could not articulate their own personal recruiting targets or even the number of hires they had achieved so far that year. The data was there though. The organization had done an excellent job aggregating it, sharing it, and telling a story. Yet, in strategy meetings or status checks, I did not see that same sense of urgency from the individual recruiters.
The Method: By taking the data one click more granular, I provided the recruiters with a dashboard that allowed them to see, at both an individual and team level, the number of hires each month, the number of hires year-to-date, and their overall contribution to organizational targets. The recruiters now had a way to dig into their own performance and see the connection between their team and the organization.
The Result: During weekly meetings, recruiters started to strategize about recruitment tactics that could help other team members who were falling behind. The team started asking leaders questions regarding the long-term roadmap, and they identified risks to their own targets. Building that link between individual performance and organizational KPIs was the missing piece that motivated the recruiters to achieve even greater performance.
Pro Tip: If leveraging dashboard tools, build in the capability to drill down by individual. Or better yet, create individualized dashboards for each team member to track their own progress.
About Graph: The number of requisitions hired against by individual recruiter, visualized alongside the cumulative total and the fiscal year target. This individualized breakdown of the org-wide goal generated clarity, accountability, and innovation.
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# 2. Team-Identified KPIs Empower a Team to Drive Improvements
The Background: In Agile Scrum, it is common to track velocity, Closed Against Completion (CAC), burn down charts, and burn up charts. These metrics are designed to put the team in the driver’s seat. Working with a scrum team, I discovered that although these metrics were being tracked and shared with the team at the end of each sprint, there was still a lack of drive on the team. During retrospectives, feedback was sparse and collaboration was limited. For this specific scrum team, seeing the basic sprint metrics felt like a check mark to send to management and nothing more.
The Method: Through individual discussions, focus groups, and team retrospectives, the team identified new KPIs that fit their needs better than the standard scrum KPIs per sprint. For example, the team had been frustrated by the process for the handoff between two sub-teams. They identified a heuristic that would indicate if the process had been followed or not. We created a new process to collect this information without additional overhead and provided the team with an indicator per sprint, allowing the team to see their progress over time. The team also found a portion of the work to be monotonous, although they understood the priority. To start visualizing this desire to move on to more interesting work, we started tracking and sharing the allocation of the type of work each sprint. In total, the team identified five new KPIs that had never been tracked before on their team.
The Result: The final sprint reports and retrospectives now became flooded with discussion. The team had the ability to see their work in a way that was more intuitive to them. Seeing these KPIs defined by the team sparked new questions and innovative ideas on how to improve as a team.
Pro Tip: Attach metrics to common themes and pain points to quantify the opportunities and spark productive conversation.
About Graph: The average number of bugs per story visualized by sprint with a 3-sprint moving average overlayed. Spikes emphasized individual sprint pain points while the trend line helped the team see overall progress in work quality and efficiency.
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# 3. Quantifying Objectives Spurs Friendly Competition
The Background: In manufacturing, a changeover is the process of switching the product in production. The team I was working with completed several changeovers per shift, following a production schedule informed by supply chain and cost optimization. Changeovers are considered overhead, a time when the manufacturing lines are not running. The technicians despised changeovers because they required manual labor with a required sense of urgency and focus. Changeovers also disrupt the machines, causing them to malfunction at a higher frequency afterward, which the technicians must then troubleshoot. At each shift change, management would report on the number of units produced in the shift and downtime on the lines. After observing the team for some time, I saw that the teams were demotivated seeing the amount of downtime or their decreases in produced units. Rather than working to improve the quality and efficiency of their lines, the technicians struggled through the painful processes and felt discouraged.
The Method: We put up a board in the technician’s lounge that tracked the changeover times and the number of machine malfunctions one-hour post changeover. We showed these metrics by shift and kicked off a monthly competition. The technicians were now motivated to have faster changeover times and higher quality changeovers than the other shifts. During shift change meetings, a friendly banter started. At the end of the month, each technician on the winning shift received a gift card, and we reset the competition.
The Result: The changeover times and quality improved drastically over the course of four months when the competitions were held. Not only did the gamification motivate the team, but the new metrics gave the technicians a new perspective. The metrics were directly connected to the struggle they experienced every shift. Seeing the changeover times and the number of machine malfunctions move down meant that their manual labor requirement decreased, and their jobs were easier. These metrics connected with the team in a more tangible way, allowing them to find motivation in the progress they could see.
Pro Tip: Identify what motivates the team and shift the narrative by tracking metrics that highlight the positive improvements.
About Graph: Number of hours to complete changeover and number of machine malfunctions visualized side-by-side by shift daily. Visualizing the metrics by comparing shift performances motivated the teams to continuously improve.
# Conclusion
They say, “What gets measured gets done.” Not only is this true, but it is critical to consider this at every level in an organization. Teams become more motivated, innovative, and encouraged when they can see their work through a lens that is meaningful to them. Building KPIs that move an organization toward the vision must be supplemented with KPIs tailored to the individual teams.
