My son and his friends talked me into joining their NFL fantasy league this season. A fantasy team owner “drafts” players and those players’ statistics are used to score points each week. You face off against one other team owner in the league. The owner whose players score the most points that week determines who wins. It struck me this week that gathering good employee metrics, monitoring them and taking action on the data is not unlike what you do when managing a fantasy sports team.
The last time I played a fantasy sport, the draft involved Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. It was 1986. Getting statistics for every game was laborious. You had to scour the newspaper to get the data you needed and for NBA basketball, it became a daily chore due to the volume of games. In a lot of ways, the difficulty of getting a player’s game statistics for every game for a fantasy sport 30 years ago reminds me of the difficulty of gathering the right employee metrics these days. For some data, you really have to want it.
Employee metrics should include condition
In the NFL and other professional sports, there are well-defined rules and timelines for determining whether or not a player can play, communicating their condition and deciding their availability for the next game. Scrutiny on professional sports players is very high and the data is readily available, so it’s easy to determine if a player is injured, will play this week, has the flu, is dealing with a family member’s illness or death, etc.
In your business, things are not that simple. While you’ll about an employee family member’s death, you won’t often learn about an employee’s family drama or relative’s illness until it has progressed to a state that impacts the employee’s ability to show up at work. The impact of such things start well before you find out about the situation.
Sometimes it isn’t sickness. Employment situations change. Kids move back home, or go off to college, or both. Weddings, divorces, financial and legal struggles and other things can put stress on an employee, even if those things aren’t their life changes. When these things happen to an employee’s child, parent or sibling, they can affect work performance, whether they like it or not.
In the NFL, a player has to go through the concussion protocol after “getting their bell rung“. They must be cleared to play football by someone who is not associated with the team. While it’s mostly about caring for the player’s condition and their future health, it also has a big impact on the team. In the old days, a player could brush aside such concerns and play anyway. Sometimes this helped the team, sometimes not.
Your employees have the same types of issues. Who is monitoring their condition? Are the people you have “on the field” in optimal condition for the task? These things are a form of metrics, but they’re difficult to gather / measure. What would help them return to their normal performance level or better?
Typical business metrics say a lot of about day to day performance, but don’t lose sight of more personal “metrics” that can affect employee performance.
Who’s the opponent?
In a NFL fantasy league, who you “play” that week is very much determined on which team they are playing. The quality of the opponent is everything. The best quarterback in the league isn’t likely to have a huge game against the best defense in the league. To score higher, you might shift to a quarterback who’s playing against a poor defense this week.
In your shop or office, the opponent may be a work task, the sales prospect, or that meeting with partners. While you probably don’t think of them as opponents, the same ideas apply. Given the situation, task, and people involved, do you have the best available players on the field? In other words, are the right people involved?
What’s the history with those people, tasks, and situations? Does that impact who you assign to the job? Pro teams practice against an opponent’s “look” the week before they play that opponent. How do you test your team in advance of the real thing?
Metrics are situational, behavioral and yes, hard numbers too.
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