What Gets Measured, Gets Done or “Did you figure out yet how to motivate a team?”
After inheriting responsibility for a rather decrepit lab, I set to work trying to rally the technician team to make improvements. Walking through the lab area one day, I discovered an unrestrained compressed gas cylinder (if you’re not familiar, these things can launch like torpedoes if they fall over and the neck breaks). Passionately explaining to the team that they could lose limbs (or worse) should an incident occur, we got the cylinder secured properly. About a week later, I found another cylinder unsecured in a nearby part of the lab – somehow risk to their life and limb was not sufficiently motivating for the team to stay on top of this safety concern. In the end, I found a way to get people to consistently secure the cylinders - the solution was to implement formal lab audits with numerical scoring, and to broadly email the audit results to the technicians and their managers – a mechanism to measure performance and report it out to all the stakeholders. The team members were mortified to have low audit scores published next to their names (and visible to their managers). The adherence to safety protocols and overall state of the lab improved dramatically. To this day, it’s surprising to me that simple numbers on an email did so much more to drive action from the team than the tangible risk of dying, but the approach works, so I have used metrics as a means to successfully influence behaviors many times since then. The old adage is true – “What gets measured, gets done.”
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