Measuring the Effectiveness of HR & Marketing
If a partner wants a quick guide to how well a lawyer
is doing, she will look at his chargeable hours.
- Q. Is this a fair measure? A. Not
always.
- Q. Is it a quick and easy guide? A. Yes.
But what if that same partner wants to understand the
contribution her HR department is making, or perhaps the success of her marketing
team.
- Q. What's the "quick and dirty"
equivalent to chargeable hours that can be applied to these support
teams? A. ???? (It's difficult, isn't it?)
The fact that there's no easy answer is perhaps one of
the reasons that law firms are willing to cut support jobs in tough times,
without a corresponding reduction in responsibilities. Since the firm has
never had a clear measure of the success of the team, it's hard to produce
metrics that will convince the firm of the folly of redundancies.
Measuring Professionals
Professionals dislike being measured, and will cite
examples of the police force, teachers and the NHS as examples of places where
a target culture has become counter-productive. There is, however, a fine line
to be drawn between accountability via performance indicators & being
measured by specific goals.
For example, "staff turnover" could
be a useful measure of HR performance, but if it is a goal to keep it below 10%
we could end up keeping people we should have let go. A good marketing
indicator could be "% revenue from clients for whom we have worked for less than 24 months", but if this
becomes a goal we could be sacrificing supporting existing clients in favour of
bringing in new ones. Yet we do need some hard numbers for assessment.
The HR response
The HR & trg team's dilemma has been addressed by many
authors - three on my shelf are "Running Training Like a Business
",
"The HR Scorecard
" & "The Human Resources Scorecard
"
In the corporate world there has been a protracted battle for HR to be seen as
"strategic", and to get a place at the "top table".
Marketing's response
The marketing challenge has had less of an airing. This is because in the corporate world the link between marketing and revenues (which we can measure) is hard-wired
into most corporate cultures. There may be battles between marketing and
sales, and even marketing and operations, but the link between their activity and
revenue is not really questioned.
In a professional services firm - particularly law
firms, where there is a heavy emphasis of service over product, the linkage
between marketing and revenue is less clear. Partners get in the way. The
sales force own the business, and routinely remove the linkage between
marketing and revenue. Marketing are therefore forced to measure either
the completion of internally-driven projects (websites, brochures,
client-service interviews) or rely on internal perceptions ("Do we think
marketing are doing a good job?"). Usually a combination of the
two. Since the partner perception measure is almost entirely subjective, marketing’s
scorecard often relies upon the managing partner's personal view of the
marketing team. Once this relationship is strained there are few hard measures
to fall back on to justify the team's rationale.
A Possible Solution
In a professional services firm, therefore, both
HR and marketing have a similar challenge. How can we establish a fair basis for making a quick assessment.? For
without any agreed output measures, how can any performance be assessed?
There are 2 stages recommended:.
Agree the internal performance indicators that you as a team should be
using. They need to be balanced, so that you can answer "yes"
to the question "If these were the only results that we achieved as a
team this year, could we say that we have been successful?" There are
usually 6-8 performance indicators, usually a mix of soft and hard measures.
The second stage requires you to answer the question. "Which 3 of
these performance indicators are so crucial to our role, that it would be reasonable
for partners to form an initial judgement on them? " No 3 indicators
will be fair and complete measures, and if you go to 4 it wouldn't be disastrous.
The aim, however, is to provide a quick metric for partners, and enable you to
argue how reductions in your team will affect these goals. These metrics would
be published regularly (monthly?), and form the basis for performance reviews.
The resulting indicators will be far from perfect, but so are chargeable hours for lawyers. At least these measures are a fairer metric than whether the managing partner - and perhaps a few other senior people - like you or not.