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There are several target options available:
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RPs – Reference Periods = What you once did – a performance benchmark achieved in the past, equivalent to an athlete’s PB – average performance over a 4 week historical period, say – it lets you assess if you’ve made any progress since
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Budgets = What you are expected to do and hopefully have agreed to do in the coming year
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BPs – Best Practices = What you could do, even must do, to compete in the next year or two – the best performance levels others, even you, have already proved possible
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Waypoints = What you should achieve to keep ‘on track’ towards your goals
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Goals = What you aspire to do – ‘long-shots’ – long term aims, even dreams
Pitfalls to beware:
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Quantified goals can cause problems:
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Tell a process line to complete 200 applications per day, or a salesman to take £10,000 worth of orders per week, and all you’ll get are ‘actual’ figures adjusted so that these targets become upper limits, never to be exceeded
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Tell a hospital A&E department to discharge or admit all patients within four hours of arrival and this can lead to massive cancellations of non-urgent procedures plus considerable inconvenience and suffering for other patients
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Tell a police sex crime unit to improve its detection rate and ‘widespread retractions’ of rape allegations have followed in the past so that fewer crimes are recorded, making targets easier to reach
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Quotas can also be negative:
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One sees employees standing around for an hour or more at the end of a working day
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They’ve completed their quotas, so they don’t need to do more work
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They’re waiting for 5 p.m. or the whistle to blow so they can go home
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They’re even unhappy doing nothing – they’d rather be busy and earn more
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According to Dr Deming: “Targets are often set to accommodate the average worker – naturally, half of them are above average, half below – peer pressure holds the upper half to the target, and no more – the lower half can’t make it so the result is losses and chaos, dissatisfaction and labour turnover”
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And, if you tell a team to increase its efficiency by x%, albeit without telling them how, this should raise at least two questions:
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If they can do x% next year with no plan, why didn’t they do it last year?
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And if x% is possible with no plan, why not (x+5)% or more?
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