Measuring employee awareness

[qcman]

I hope this is the right forum for this question. Has anyone tracked employee awareness as a KPI? If so how did you measure it?

 

[N.galt]

You can measure anything as a KPI! Not sure if you're referring to a particular standard clause but this is what we are using in my company.

Ironically- we are measuring as a KPI, our progress in implementing KPI's (see attached, I've removed any sensitive information).

On the front sheet we've said what the task is that we need to do- to achieve our goal (this is based on a strategy we've completed for Quality).

Then on the other sheets we've broken our goals into smaller tasks and we're basing our KPI's on the target date for completion and the actual date and also the % completed.

So if awareness is your goal, your front sheet might say "Awareness around XYZ" and break it down into employee names and awareness steps. So, maybe training and the % target of employees trained for the business year, etc.

Another step of your plan might be, "poster campaign" and again a target month for the business year and % completed. Wala, a KPI is born.

Not sure if this helps (hopefully it does)- there's also other threads on how people have implemented awareness in their places of work.

 

[qcman]

All input is appreciated. In your example ( which is nice ) it appears you are measuring steps to completing the goal. When I was asked about this I was thinking the goal is a 100% informed associate and measuring that. May be that is not how it should be measured.

 

[N.galt]

ah right, I understand.

Maybe as a measurement of the results of a questionnaire then? To monitor improvement over time?

I’m just spitballing here

 

[dramman]

I have seen this KPI executed. Usually by tracking survey responses or training. Fr example, if the objective is to improve employee awareness of the quality policy you could track the percentage of employees trained on the quality policy. Or issue surveys throughout the year to all employees quizzing them on the quality policy.

 

[Steve Prevette]

I hope this is the right forum for this question. Has anyone tracked employee awareness as a KPI? If so how did you measure it?

I worked on analysis of employee sueversy over the years. First question I always ask - so what is the purpose of measuring employee awareness? What would you do if "employee awareness" (of what?) was increasing? decreasing?

 

[qcman]

Steve, that was the first question I asked when this came up

 

[Steve Prevette]

Steve, that was the first question I asked when this came up

Yes, reminds me of a group that wanted to measure employee morale. After some rather meaningless discussion, I said - I've invented an employee morale meter. Let's see - you are a 3, your are a 7, and you are (gasp) a 10. Now, what are you going to do with that information. They decided that was not such a good idea.

I have had success with "culture" surveys, which I suspect "awareness" is a stand in for - dumb employees, if only they were "aware" we would not have so many problems. At one facilty, the most important culture question was "senior management - above my manager - visits my place of work". When that metric went bad, we knew there was an issue. The usual respone from the Union Rep was - how did you you know we had a problem? You won't believe what the VP did/said last week.

Many senior managers hated that "metric" but we did point out when they said - sure we visit the workplace - our response was - well, obviously the employees did not notice you there. How about conneting with some workers next time?

 

[Randy]

Kinda like a psyc exam, skew your answers to mess with the process and throw everyone off. (Want to know how many times I've been evaluated as loving, kind, stable and open?)

Very similar to an ergonomics survey that has a line drawing of a person with the instructions "Place an arrow where you hurt".

 

[Steve Prevette]

Kinda like a psyc exam, skew your answers to mess with the process and throw everyone off. (Want to know how many times I've been evaluated as loving, kind, stable and open?)

Very similar to an ergonomics survey that has a line drawing of a person with the instructions "Place an arrow where you hurt".

Does remind me of a question on the aforementioned survey - I know what to do in an emergency. Of course, all strongly agrees. I did convince the survey owners to change it to "I am confident my co-workers know what to do in an emergency". Got a bit more realistic responses on that.