The People Measurement Manual: Measuring Attitudes, Behaviours and Beliefs in Your Organisation

Citation

Calvert, P. (2005), "The People Measurement Manual: Measuring Attitudes, Behaviours and Beliefs in Your Organisation", The Electronic Library, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 256-257. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470510593013

Organisations have traditionally measured financial success and failure. More recently some organisations have started to measure customer satisfaction and/or service quality. Only very recently has anyone looked at measuring the organisation's people in any meaningful way. Welleans points out that it is relatively easy to measure processes, but unless you know the impact of the processes on the organisation's mission then this is not a particularly useful thing to do. What we really want to measure are staff behaviours, and more than the easily measured ones, such as punctuality. After all, we all know people who are at their desks on time but who do not do a useful thing for the rest of the day, whereas others are much more productive. What are the behaviours that make them more productive?

Sadly, this book does not provide many useful answers. The author applies systems thinking to human problems and they often do not seem to match. The techniques Welleans suggests are sound enough – there is a chapter on employee surveys, and one on interviews to cater for the attitudes and beliefs in the organisation. Although this is hardly new, it might be useful in knowledge management, for which the organisation's awareness of staff attitudes and opinions is very important, yet often not assessed. It is in the chapter on “monitoring people” that he suggests a continuous measurement method (that looks a little like engineering process control) that one finds an innovative and potentially useful idea. Surprisingly, it is not an intrusive method, although some people would object to being watched (or to think they are being watched) all the time. The method measures behaviour, and if this technique were applied in a situation in which the staff had been given very clear instructions about what behaviours were considered desirable and which were not, then it could be useful. There are other ways of doing this, such as mystery shopping, which have not been mentioned.

There is an index but no bibliography – indeed, no references at all. So this is very much one man's view and if you like it then you will find something worthwhile in here. I cannot recommend it, though.