Does she look happy to be serving you?
Ok, metrics crowd. Let’s say you have 200 employees and a small chain of restaurants. You serve hundreds of customers per day. You decide to measure your customer’s satisfaction with your service.
So, you put a little survey form on every table. Servers ask people to please fill them out. And are you ever happy with the results! 95% of your customers are very satisfied with your service! Isn’t that great?!
Well, spreadsheet crowd, is it?
First of all, the pictured server is not likely to encourage anyone to do anything let alone report on her service. Your survey is certainly skewed. All self-conducted, voluntary surveys are.
But what you will never be able to measure is the damage this one (pictured) employee is doing to your business. You won’t catch it on a spreadsheet my metrics loving friend.
Is your business off? Fix your service first. You can’t do it with metrics. You have to watch, observe. Then train, then discipline, then fire if necessary.
Employees with rotten attitudes poison a business but they don’t show up on paper. Watch them. Their real nature will come out.
Fix your service first. No matter what your business, fix your service.
Chris Reich, Author of TeachU’s Business Talk Blog
Chris@TeachU.com