Most KPI habits for measuring business performance don’t actually work and need to be replaced with techniques that do. Here are eight tips to help you better measure staff and business performance.

Many think performance measurement is a brainstorming session. But inevitably, the result is too many, not enough, and things that aren’t even measurable. Brainstorming is one of several bad KPI habits that somehow became common practice. And these bad KPI habits are why most of us struggle to measure what matters, meaningfully.

Another common struggle is getting people to buy-in, but instead they feel threatened by being measured. Consequently, they hide performance problems, manipulate data, and measure only what’s working. Another struggle is having hard-to-measure goals. Goals filled with weasel words like ‘efficient’, ‘effective’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘productive’ are too ambiguous to meaningfully measure.

Following Einstein’s definition of insanity, better performance measures won’t come by doing what we’ve always done. The bad KPI habits have to stop, and in their place, we need techniques that work.

Better measures come from being deliberate about eight specific steps in the process of measuring performance.

STEP 1: Make sure everyone shares the same understanding of what performance measurement is. Fixing everyone’s focus on measuring processes, rather than people, will help dissipate the threat they feel about it. Better measures come when people see they are a tool in their hand, not a rod for their back.

STEP 2: Write goals in measurable language, before choosing the measures. The weasel words have to go. A goal is only measurable when its meaning is clear and specific and recognisable in the real world. Better measures come when we strive to write our goals in the language a 10-year-old would understand.

STEP 3: Choose meaningful measures that quantify direct evidence of our goals. When our goals are written measurably, we don’t need to brainstorm measures. Better measures are simply quantifications of how much evidence we see, hear, touch or detect in some way, that convinces us the goals are happening.

STEP 4: Get ownership from stakeholders, quickly, easily and engagingly. To avoid the risk of people not buying in to performance measures, all these stakeholders need an opportunity to contribute naturally, easily, quickly and honestly. Better measures come when people have buy-in, not just sign-off.

STEP 5: Document in detail the implementation requirements for each measure. So many measures are never successfully reported or used because no-one worked out how to. Better measures come when we don’t leave their calculation, data sources, purpose and ownership open to assumption.

STEP 6: Interpret signals from the measures by validly interpreting them. Comparing this month to last month (or comparing any two points) is not a big enough sample to know whether the difference is a true change, or part of the measure’s natural variability. Better measures come from knowing this natural variability, and focusing on changes in its pattern over time, rather than on the individual points of the measure.

STEP 7: Create useful and usable performance reports that inspire us to action. Typical performance reports are next to useless, especially when they focus on the latest and greatest dashboard design. Better measures are reported in a way that visually answers three specific questions only: What is performance doing? Why is it doing that? How should we respond?

STEP 8: Set and reach performance targets. Improving our business processes to move ‘as-is’ performance toward ‘should-be’ is the ultimate role of performance measures. Better measures focus us on the root causes that constrain the performance results we want, rather than treating symptoms that merely compensate for under-performing processes.

A deliberate approach to measuring performance replaces the bad habits that cause our KPI struggles, with techniques that are easier, faster and more engaging. And better measurement transforms the performance of our businesses.