“And how are we today?” How I introduced daily morale as a powerful KPI

Key performance indicators (KPIs) may seem like a quintessentially modern business tool. Even the name is ripe for buzzword bingo. Yet the idea seems to have been around for a very long time. 

For example, the emperors of China’s ancient Wei Dynasty would apparently scrutinise, and presumably track, the work of the country’s ruling family. Venetian mariners in the 13th century established a KPI that remains critical today: return on investment. 

Jump ahead to the early 19th century, and a Scottish miller is said to have brought productivity metrics to industry – hanging coloured wooden cubes over each employee’s desk to reflect their output.

These unattributed stories, repeated around the internet, are difficult to verify. One thing we do know for sure is that, in the early 1990s, Robert Kaplan and David Norton invented the balanced scorecard, a tool to monitor performance that wasn’t solely related to financial progress. Since then, the KPI as we know it has become a staple in a wide range of organisations – tracking success, or the lack thereof, in everything from profit margins to customer retention. 

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Today, with the working world evolving all the time, fresh areas of performance need to be measured and compared. And newer metrics, such as employee engagement, have been added to many KPI dashboards.

A “people-focused approach”

One convert to this people-focused approach is Kraft Heinz. As part of a recent shift towards servant leadership – a more collaborative management style that asks managers to prioritise the needs of their teams – the food company now conducts a formal employee engagement survey every six months. 

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Yet for Anton Hickey CMgr FCMI, site manager at one of the company’s food facilities, this measure didn’t go far enough.