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THE BENEFITS OF SCOREKEEPING

What are you going to get out of all this? How will you know it's worth the trouble? After all, I'm asking you to spend a considerable amount of energy and attention in producing public records for folks who probably haven't asked for them, and probably aren't used to seeing them. Where's the payoff?

There's one very obvious payoff, and that's the simple fact that, with a clearly posted and properly maintained performance graph, you always have an objective visible picture of where you are. If you're asked by front-office management how your department is doing, you don't have to resort to weasel phrases like "an acceptable rate of progress." You can just haul out your graphs. But there are other, less tangible benefits to using such a Recording system, and you're going to find in the long run that these intangible benefits are what make the system really work.

First, the mere fact of Recording lets people know that you are interested in what they are doing, and that nearly always provides a motivational incentive to do better. That's an incentive that no amount of "You're all part of my family" blarney can buy. The workers in the businesses I visit are - every one of them - from the great state of Missouri. You can yammer all you want about being interested in what they're doing, and they'll just stare at you. Which is what you deserve. But post a graph on the individual Behaviors that comprise their performance - that is, show them you're paying attention - and they'll start paying attention, too.

This is not exactly a new discovery, although today's number-crunchers frequently forget it. Back in 1927, in fact, a Harvard Business School professor named Elton Mayo proved the value of "paying attention" in a series of classic experiments at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant in Illinois. He and his colleagues went in to that plant to see if making changes in lighting conditions would improve the morale and the performance of the workers. What they found set the whole "science" of industrial hygiene on its ear.

If you improved the lighting in a certain department, the Hawthorne experimenters found, sure enough productivity went up. But it also went up in those departments where the lighting was actually made worse. The only departments where productivity didn't improve were those the experimenters ignored. Their conclusion, described as the "Hawthorne effect," was that improvements in motivation and performance resulted from the simple fact, and not just the content, of attention. I've seen that lesson borne out in every industrial operation where we institute a clearly posted, up-to-date Recording system.
A second benefit of using Recording is that it provides your people with an objective measure of their work that cannot be talked around or marked up to personal factors. Every manager knows somebody who seems insensitive to either positive or negative reinforcement, because he figures that praise comes only when a manager is "feeling good," and criticism comes when he's "feeling lousy." And the assessment isn't always off base. Some managers do mete out their rewards and punishments based not on actual performance but on how the marriage is going or on how much heartburn they're getting from last night's pepperoni pizza.

The combination of Pinpointing specific performance variables and Recording their change on a graph makes it impossible for either managers or workers to explain away a bad situation as a spinoff of marital strife or indigestion. The facts are staring you in the face. Since the figures are generated by performance factors, not personalities, you can't condemn them as subjectively judgmental. That means they're going to be seen as fair. I guarantee you that a fair, objective appraisal of my performance is going to get me motivated, every time, better than one that I see as unjust.

Third, a scorekeeping system like the one I'm describing here tends to make work fun: in other words, more like the games that we choose to play even though we don't really have to. I'm aware that, to some people in business life, the idea of work being fun will come as a startling, even dangerous, doctrine. Work is supposed to be hard, I can hear them saying. Tough, and necessary, and the sweat of your brow, and all that Protestant work ethic stuff: the last thing it's supposed to be is enjoyable.

This attitude toward work is essential a puritanical one, and you know what H.L. Mencken said about Puritanism: he called it "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." We've gotten a little more enlightened about work since the Puritans' day, and even since Mencken's day, but the attitude that work is a cousin to misery has not entirely died out. There are still plenty of Theory X managers around who subscribe to it, and who use it to justify the notion that the average worker needs to be coerced or threatened into performing. But the idea is simply baloney, and one of the quickest ways to prove that is to inject into the workplace some of the elements of play. Elements like striving for a goal, and putting out 100 percent effort, and enjoying the sheer activity of what you're doing, and the sports addict's system of scorekeeping that ties the whole business together.

In whatever we do, we all like to win. Winning may not be everything, but it sure as hell is difficult to get fired up for an activity if you lose at it all the time - or, even worse, if you never know whether you're winning or losing. A Recording system like the one I've described in this chapter lets you know, week by week or day by day, how you're doing. It allows you to keep dreaming, and aiming, and reaching. It lets you keep trying to improve because, however you're doing today, someday you're going to be a winner. If that ain't fun, I don't know what is. And it's because it's fun that it works.

Finally, a scorekeeping system allows an individual to see how his personal performance ties in with the larger, overall performance of the organization. The guy who pushes the yellow button or does the payroll can read the quarterly report and discover that the company increased its profits by 7 percent. But so what? Why should he care about that unless, as I said at the outset of the book, it makes a difference to him? And how is it going to make a difference to him? There are only two ways I know of. Either the difference can be external and tangible, like an increase in pay or a bonus or a cut of a profit-sharing plan. Or it can be internal: it can be the satisfaction of knowing that he has contributed to a winning team.

There's nothing wrong with pay incentives and bonuses, but in my experience they always play second fiddle to the intangible, internal motivating factors like feeling good as part of a good team. Knowing that you've done your part to bring about that 7 percent increase is what really turns most workers on: it's what gets them motivated in the first place, and keeps them coming. Establishing that connection between individual effort and overall improved performance is a critical element in any team motivation system. The Recording element of the P.R.I.C.E. system is one solid way of making that connection.

A broader, and equally important way of making the connection is to involve the worker, at all levels, in the setting of objectives and establishing of baselines and making of decisions that affect him. Once you've set up a reliable scorekeeping system, you next need to make each team player a part of keeping those scores as high as possible. You do that by developing the "I" element of the P.R.I.C.E. system, the element we call Involvement.

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