One of my favorite goal-setting concepts is something I refer to as a “Leave Behind.” This is one of the most useful techniques I’ve found for creating incentive plan goals in areas that are inherently subjective and difficult to measure.
Creating goals for objective and/or quantifiable measures is simple; you just choose a number. If you are measuring something like productivity, lost time injuries, or patient satisfaction, you can fall back on data in the form of output per labor hour, injuries per 1000 work days, or percentile ranking versus prior year respectively.
But what do you do when the measure involves competency training, or process improvement, or leadership effectiveness? Many managers shy away from using these important measures because they don’t think they are measurable. Or, worse yet, they include them but use nebulous, irrelevant goals that result in confusion, misaligned expectations, inappropriate payouts, or all three.
Take for example a situation where a manager responsible for a hospital’s biomedical equipment (e.g., IV pumps, scanners, microscopes, centrifuges, etc.) is paying an outside company to perform maintenance and upkeep on the equipment. Let’s say that outside vendor keeps raising its rates and the manager wishes to reduce these costs and ultimately start doing the maintenance in-house. He develops a measure for this and puts it on his incentive plan.
Most managers approach this one of two ways: they either focus on steadily reducing costs as a way to demonstrate success, or they focus on getting their people trained to perform the task. This might results in goals that look something like this:
|
MEASURE |
THRESHOLD |
TARGET |
OUTSTANDING |
|
Reduce Maintenance Cost |
Reduce cost by 20% |
Reduce cost by 40% |
Reduce cost by 60% |
|
Competency Training |
Complete training by end of Q4 |
Complete training by end of Q3 |
Complete training by end of Q2 |
The problem with such goals is that they are entirely unclear as to what must occur to accomplish the objective. This often results in payouts for the wrong thing or perhaps for nothing.
In the first example, what if the manager finds a cheaper vendor to do the work? The goal could be accomplished, even if the vendor does shoddy work that results in all the equipment breaking down. And nothing is accomplished toward preparing the hospital to do the work itself.
In the second example, the training might actually be completed, but how do we know the technicians actually learned anything worthwhile? Did anyone successfully complete the training or just show up? And just because the training was completed earlier, it doesn’t mean it was done better; in fact, it could be just the opposite.
Enter the “Leave Behind.” A “Leave Behind” is just that, something of value left behind. The trick in designing effective incentive plan measures is to ensure that every time you make a payout, there is something of value left behind. Then even if a goal is only partially achieved and you didn’t get everything you wanted, what you did get had real value. Think of it this way – if at the end of the year the manager left, would his replacement be able to start where he left off and build on the results, or would the new manager need to start over? If the goal involved a “Leave Behind,” the new manager should be able to build on what was left behind.
This is the real problem with the measures in the examples above. If you were the manager’s boss, ask yourself this question – “If I paid my manager to accomplish those things, what would I really have at the end of the year?” The answer is very little.
Now look at the following measure:
COMPETENCY TRAINING
THRESHOLD: 1) List all critical life-support and high risk biomedical equipment to be included in the training and present list to Dir Facilities (Del Re) for approval. 2) Develop an outline or template for capturing the necessary information on how to test, repair, calibrate and maintain all pieces of equipment. 3) Review this template with Dir Facilities to ensure all essential information is captured. Secure approval on the format. 4) Complete the template for all of the agreed pieces of equipment.
TARGET: Inventory the current skills of all Biomed Techs and determine their level of competency relative to each piece of equipment and identify which Techs require additional training and what training they require. Document this in the form of a report and propose a plan for conducting training to supplement their skills as necessary. This report should include a timeline, projected costs, resources required (internal and external). At the end of this phase, we will understand the gap between what each Tech knows and what they need to know and a plan for filling this gap.
OUTSTANDING: Fully implement the training such that by the end of the year all Biomed Techs are fully trained on all critical life-support and high risk biomedical equipment and that they are following standardized, documented procedures for this work. At the end of this process, they will go into the Health Stream module, take the associated test(s), receive a grade, and pass the test(s). Full achievement of this goal occurs when all Techs pass all tests.
If you read this carefully, you’ll see that something of value is “left behind” at each level. And what is left behind has real and lasting value to the organization. That value is worth paying for, which makes it an ideal incentive plan measure.
So when you are developing incentive plan measures, take care to consider what will be left behind if/when the goal (or part of the goal) is completed. And when you are weighting the goal or otherwise determining the payout, compare the value of the “Leave Behind” to the amount you must pay to get it. The key to well-designed goals, especially in areas less easily measured, is to ensure that when the year is over, something of value has been left behind that will be of lasting value to the organization. This simple test will make you a far better incentive plan designer.
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