Long story short, there are two groups of performance measures your organization needs to ensure you are advancing your mission in an effective and timely manner:

1. Performance measures for management, administrative units, and internal functions
2. Performance measures that quantify the quality and impact of your community-facing services (aka, program performance measures)

It is also important to note that performance measures are wildly different from the measures that communicate the well-being of the ENTIRE population you target (we call these indicators). The reason they’re different is that your organization can’t be held responsible for the well-being of an entire population – that’s a collaborative effort that requires coordinated strategy, partnerships, and measurement. Performance measures help you quantify what you are directly responsible for: your internal management, the quality of your services, and the impact of those services on the smaller client population.

All performance measures generally fall into three categories:

1. How much did you do? (what were your activities, inputs, etc.?)
2. How well did you do it? (what level of quality did you put into your actions and inputs?)
3. Is anyone or anything better off (what was the impact of the first two measures?)

Ideally, you will want to identify performance measures in both umbrella groups and each of the three categories. When you’re getting started, don’t go overboard! Try identifying just one performance measure per group and category. Then, when you get more comfortable, add more measures as appropriate.

Let’s discuss this in more detail.

Administrative Performance Measures

Administrative units or functions should prioritize effective performance measures that help them work more efficiently. Some of these performance measures are easier to identify and measure, such as simple numerical quantifiers like “how much service did we provide?” However, it is more important (and more challenging) to find a way to measure whether or not your organization is better off as a result.

Administrative units primarily serve employees within the organization in which they work. Therefore, to self-monitor, they should ask themselves how well they support their employees. Use both qualitative and quantitative means (how much and how effectively) to monitor how your administration can support employees. 

Here are some examples:

Administrative Performance Measures:

1. Workload staff ratio
2. Staff turnover rate (This can be measured by % of vacant positions – or more interestingly – % of employees with the organization one year or less.)
3. Staff morale (usually from surveys)
4. Percent of staff fully trained
5. Percent of satisfied customers (with courtesy and timeliness of service) by function
6. Percent of bilingual staff
7. Worker safety (usually accident or injury claim rate)
8. Employee Performance Measures:

You can see more administrative functions, personnel, and budgeting examples here.

Program Performance Measures

As opposed to administrative performance measures, program performance measures focus on the quality and impact of your public programming. Since they require interaction with your clients, they may be more challenging to measure. So how do you collect such data? One of the most common and effective strategies is to ask your program participants about their results through surveys. If your role exclusively focuses on employee engagement and satisfaction, you can also use surveys to facilitate communication between employees and management, gain insight into morale and productivity, and serve as a meaningful way to let employees know that their voices are heard) Similarly, surveying your clients or customers will provide you with measures of how well your organization is doing concerning your big-picture mission and goals. 

Read our seven tips for creating effective program surveys if you’re unsure where to start. Creating quality surveys is an essential skill that will lead to better results in your performance management. 

To simplify matters, you’ll want to determine measures that fulfill the three types of performance measures listed above as they relate to your programs. Here are some generic examples that can fit any type of program, whether it involves education, juvenile justice, mental health, economic development, or any other realm:

Example programmatic performance measures:

How Much Did You Do?

• # Customers Served
• # Program Participants
• # Products Shipped
• # Goods Created

How Well Did You Do It?

• Program Attendance Rate
• Customer Satisfaction
• Client/Staff ratio
• Staff turnover rate
• Staff morale (usually from surveys)
• Percent of staff with training/certification
• Percent of customers seen in their own language
• Staff safety (usually accident or injury claim rate)

Is Anyone Better Off?

• #/% of satisfied customers (with service delivery functions)
• #/% of improved customers after six months
• Cost/Benefit Ratio
• Return on Investment

Want more specific examples? You can see different performance measures categorized by sector here.

Next Steps

1. Give it Some Time!

Once you understand how to measure your performance internally and externally, you must ensure that your measures are effective. Sometimes, it can be counterproductive to change your performance measures too often, so give your measures some time to produce valuable insights.

1. Define Your Laser-Focus and Make Sure Your Measures Reflext Your Mission.

Your measures will vary greatly depending on the industry in which you work. However, the idea should remain the same. Your organization aims to improve the lives of your community, and your performance measures should reflect that change.

1. Sign Up for More Tips.

Because specific performance measures can vary greatly depending on the industry and needs of your organization, this particular blog aims to address the broad needs that can be applied to your own work. We plan to release some suggested measures for specific industries in the future. To stay up to date on our blogs, subscribe to our monthly newsletter by entering your email address on the form below.