What Do You Actually Produce?

by Neil I. Clark

There is a lot of stress on results and performance, but how do you define these things? In some jobs, of course, it’s easy. In sales, for instance, the result would be something like volume of sales or revenue generated. In other areas, however, it may not be so simple.

The first thing you have to agree to is this: all jobs have a definable result. Why else would the job exist if it did not contribute to the overall results of the department or organisation? If you don’t define it correctly, however, you may find yourself working very hard, yet not be considered very productive. Have you ever seen someone who worked all day and didn’t seem to get anything done?

The biggest trap in defining results is to confuse the ACTIONS necessary to produce the results with the RESULTS themselves. Take a cleaner, for instance. The actions a cleaner performs include dusting, sweeping, mopping, etc. These are the things they DO, but if you said that "mopped floors" was one of the results they produced, you would fall into the trap.

We had a cleaner once who mopped the hallway with a dirty mop. The result was that the sides of the walls all down the corridor got dirtier and dirtier every time he did the mopping. When confronted on the subject, he said, "Well, I’m paid to mop the floors, not the walls." He thought he was supposed to produce "mopped floors", so that’s what he did. A better definition of the result he was supposed to achieve would have been "clean hallways". If he had been operating on this definition, he would have seen immediately that the dirty mop was impeding his result. (I’m not sure if that particular cleaner would have been smart enough to work this one out, by the way, but that’s another story.)

Take another example. Consider a Personal Assistant to an executive. What does a PA produce? Is it "typed letters", or "booked meetings"? These are certainly some of the actions they perform, but these actions do not really define the valuable result that would aid the executive. A better definition is probably something like "time saved for the executive".

With this results-oriented definition, a PA would strive to take away from the executive any actions that the executive need not spend time on. If the PA could free up several hours each week in this way, the executive would certainly appreciate it and feel that his or her PA was really performing well. Some of the actions may still include typing letters and booking meetings, but by focusing on saving time for the executive, the PA could find lots of other things that would also achieve this same result (and even eliminate some actions that did not contribute to the desired result).

Take a look at what you do. Then, extend your view to the RESULTS your actions produce. It is these results that define your production. It is these results that should form the basis of your performance measure.