Your Incentives May Be Charging Customers for Internal Efficiency

A business can improve a departmental measure by making the customer do more work. Shorter call times can mean another call. Faster check-in can mean unresolved questions later. Higher activity throughput can mean less time to understand what a visitor needs. The internal number improves while the effort moves somewhere the dashboard does not show.

This is not an argument against efficiency. It is an argument for measuring the complete task. An operation is not more efficient simply because one team finishes its part sooner if customers or colleagues then have to repair the result.

Follow the work beyond the measured boundary

Choose a target that receives significant management attention and trace what happens after the activity it measures. If reception is rewarded for speed, inspect repeat enquiries, missing information and later service recovery. If a sales team is rewarded for bookings, inspect the suitability of those bookings and the demands they place on delivery.

Use specific cases before drawing broad conclusions. A fast interaction may be exactly what the customer wanted. The question is whether the target encourages people to finish the task well or simply to transfer it out of their queue.

Ask employees where they feel pressure to make that trade-off. Their answers can identify a design problem before customer feedback makes it visible. Make clear that the purpose is to understand the measure, not to punish people for responding to expectations the organisation created.

Pair efficiency with evidence of completion

A useful measure of speed needs a companion measure of whether the intended outcome was achieved. Depending on the task, that might involve repeat contact, order accuracy, successful resolution or a customer confirmation that they understood what happens next.

Do not add so many measures that nobody can interpret the result. Select a small number that exposes the important trade-off. Define them clearly enough that teams cannot improve one by changing how they classify the work.

Also examine the denominator. Excluding complex cases from the main measure can make performance look better while hiding the situations most important to the proposition. If exclusions are legitimate, report them transparently and explain how those customers are served.

Make shared outcomes visible

Where two teams jointly determine the experience, give them a shared view of the outcome. They may still need local measures for planning and management, but those should sit beneath a common understanding of success.

In an illustrative restaurant, kitchen speed and table service both influence the meal. The leadership question is not which team can produce the most favourable number. It is whether the combined rhythm supports the occasion the restaurant promises and the economics it needs.

Shared visibility also helps prevent blame. Teams can examine the sequence together and identify which decision would improve the whole journey, rather than defend the point at which work crossed a departmental boundary.

Change the reward conversation

Managers communicate priorities through what they notice and praise. Recognise examples in which an employee prevents repeat work, identifies a misleading measure or helps another team complete the customer outcome. Explain the commercial value of that behaviour rather than treating it as optional helpfulness.

Explore Q Branch's Operational Excellence articles for more on connecting performance with delivery. Efficiency becomes valuable when it removes unnecessary effort from the whole experience, including the effort customers would otherwise have to supply.

Illustrative photograph; pictured people and businesses are not case studies in this article. Photo source: Pexels.