When watching the Olympics, you see the gymnast getting ready to perform, with his or her name posted beside their wins/losses so far. You may see their age, where they are from as well as lots of other details. Why is this done?

It’s a way for the people in the stands to decide on the quality of the gymnast. It also is the motivation for the gymnast. Of course, you know they want to have really great personal statistics up there on a huge screen for thousands of people to see. This would include the coach, his or her fellow teammates, and a host of other folks they want to impress. It’s got to motivate them to try to do better.

Owners usually don’t know how well their employees are doing. They might be able to see each person’s sales. That’s pretty good, but it’s not good enough.

In order to know where someone should improve (and to give earned praise), you need to know exactly how everyone is doing. The only way you are going to find out is to measure everything that is important.

Some people think that just going out there and doing the best job you can is enough.

In this case, that’s totally wrong. Performance needs to be measured. You need to know how your employees are doing and they, as well, should know how they are performing. There are various ways to go about creating a measurement system. You need to decide what things are important to measure in your business.

There are questions to ask such as:

• Is this measurement important?
  
• Is it easy to track?
  
• Will the employee understand the reasoning behind the measurement?
  
• Does the statistic measure what you want to measure?

Realize that this may, of course, cause resistance. Some people may say it’s not right for other employees to see their performance. These will be the same folks who have lower performance usually. You may experience some turnover by those that have lower performance.

One good thing is that the performance of the people who stay may rise significantly. Good employees are usually quite competitive. They’ll try to be the top in each category measured. They really do appreciate being able to see what they have achieved.

There are several things to consider when you determine what to measure. You should start out slowly. I wouldn’t track more than five categories the first time you start to measure performance. You can add categories in the future and reevaluate yearly.

The main point is to measure everything that’s important to you and your business, post it, and watch sales grow.