Thread by @jayanaman

If you are working in a company, how do you measure the impact you are bringing to the table?

Do you even bother to take a minute to keep track of what you are doing? Or it’s just vibes?

Have you ever asked yourself; how am I contributing to business growth?

#CarryYourCareer

The thing is whatever you do now feeds into the next stage of your career. Unless you don’t have plans of progressing or you work in organizations that promote people based on years of experience and not merits.

Nonetheless not growing your value will leave you obsolete at a Pt.

The benefits of measuring the work you do is that
I. It gives you purpose in the workplace

II. It helps you focus your efforts and strategies to deliver results

III. It brings you personal satisfaction as well

IV. It sets you up for progression even beyond your company

V. It helps you to adjust your own career plans

VI. It gives you on-the-go content for your personal brand; CV, LinkedIn, Networking, Personal Website, Interview preps, Scholarship applications etc.

I have come across people who say they can’t measure the work they are doing

It takes a keen eye to get you to focus on how to measure your performance and use that for your personal branding.

I will try explaining some concepts.

There are two levels of measurements.

Measurements on how much work you do?

and then...

... measurement on the the change you are leading in an organisation.

The former is better than not measuring at all. The latter? Way way better. That is what gives you the authority to command value. It boosts your confidence.

MEASURING HOW MUCH WORK YOU DO

First trick: Try and quantify any countable noun that you encounter in your line of work. Pull up your job description or if you don’t have one (which is not the best), reflect on your everyday roles and responsibilities and write them down.

Keep asking yourself How many/How much. I will give examples.
You are a researcher? HOW MANY articles have you published?

You are an administrative executive. HOW MANY business processes are you assisting with or how many employees do you support in your everyday work?

Customer service rep?
HOW MANY customers do you engage?

Project Manager?
HOW MANY projects do you manage? HOW MUCH do they cost?

It goes on and on and on. Now after doing this level 1 measurement, take it to the next level.

Vividly describe the activity linked to the countable nouns you identified and quantified.

Identify more countable nouns. Places, people, time. These 3.

Back to researcher

Published 12 papers. How many pages? How many places(countries)? How many people did you work with? How long did it take you to write these papers?

These will unearth the attributes you possess as well as that which your paper possesses (a reflection of you anyway)

Don’t be worried about what numbers/metrics and what not to keep. Keep journaling these figures. It’s better to have all the figures and exclude some than have a few and need the rest later.

Published 12 papers
600 pages
In 1 year
Collaborated with 7 other researchers etc

Then now go on and identify these things; Did you work singlehandedly or in a team?
Indicate if it’s the former - Shows that you can work individually

If it’s the latter, did you lead the team or you collaborated as a member? Indicate and add the number of team members

I WILL BE BACK WITH MORE JUICE
#CarryYourCareer

As a continuation;

You may not be the leader of a team in a whole but you may lead some tasks as part of the teamwork. Highlight that part you led.

Eg. You’re not the lead researcher but you led effort on data collections.

That should be your selling point

Led the collection of X data entries as part of a research team of X using ABC

Where X is a number AND ABC is the tool/software you used.

NOW LETS SHIFT THE CONVERSATION! The Value part 😉

Inasmuch as talking about how much work you do shows your audience how much work you can take on, what people are looking for is value.

Your employer, that scholarship reading committee, your boss, your network; they are looking for people who change the game. CHANGE is...

... the keyword.

Let’s categorize change into two branches.

I. Solving problems
II. Improving business processes and making things better

For Point II. if you find yourself in the “If it’s not broken, don’t touch/fix it” mode, you may want to reevaluate your decisions)

It’s even harder improving established business processes than solving problems.

There is also a sub branch under II. which is about exploiting opportunities. When you exploit opportunities, it gives you the chance to make things better, although you may end up solving problems.

The very important step most people miss is that when they solve problems or cause business improvement, they do not quantify the change.

It’s a big issue. I have seen it so many times.

Without the data points, you can’t quantify and that affects how you SELL yourself

Although the process is as important as the result, humans love to hear the results first and then that baits them into wanting to know how

Eg. Résumés/CV tell the story about the what and how much you did and then the interview stage brings you in to talk about How you did it.

HOW DO YOU QUANTIFY CHANGE?

It’s simple. Percentages.

Percentages are not guess work in this case. You must use intuition to guess percentages. Rather rely on real data points associated with your work.

There are so many data points you can use based on the type of job

The most common ones however, that relates to business/employers/business owners are
I. Revenue/Profits
II. Losses/Cost
III. Time
IV. Resources
V. Risk

Sell yourself on these 5 data points and your perceived value increases.

Back to percentages...

...Percentages help you measure the degree of change of that data point. So there is a before and there is an after situation. What splits this is time.

If you encounter a problem, it takes time for you to solve it.

The person causing the difference is YOU.

By communicating these quantified changes using percentages, it is assumed that the organisation wouldn’t have achieved that level of change if you were not present.

That’s just it.

Let’s look at some real examples

You are working as an HR like @ABYalley and maybe you are in charge of recruitment and talent management.

First determine what success means to you in your role

Success means
I. People not leaving their jobs
II. Employees feeling safe in the workplace
III. Building capacity

For employees.

The next step is to ask yourself;
How do I measure the rate at which people leave the work place?

It’s simple: HOW MANY people who leave the company at the end of the year/ quarter/ month? Year is better(a personal preference) 😃

Let’s say last year was 10

You should tell yourself that that 10 should not repeat. Success means people should not be leaving.

As I mentioned, measuring gets you to realign your strategies. You will now set off to be looking for reasons why people left. That will help you in ensuring that 2021, no repeat

This is quite a truncated strategy but you document
The problem/situation: 10 people left in 2020
Your task: Had to reduce attrition
Approach: the strategy you are building
Result: At the end of 2021, count the number of people who left and compare it to the initial 10

So let’s say at the end of 2021, only 3 people left the company, you compare that to 10 in 2020 and then you do your basic math;

10-3 = 7
7/10 = 70%

You have reduced employee attrition by 70%? Hehehe not so fast. That’s just the % diff in the number of people you lost.

There is a proper KPI; employee attrition rate which strikes the number of people in a given period leaving against the total number of employees in that same period.

So if in 2020, there were 60 employees and 10 left, that was a 16.67% employee attrition rate

If in 2021, we have 50 and lost only 3, that gives us an employee attrition rate of 6% (3/50 x 100%)

Now calculate the difference:
16.67 - 6 = 10.67%

This does not mean your reduced it by 10.67%. You reduced it by 10.67 percentage points.

If you want to know the percentage...

... use the simple percentage formula
Difference/initial x 100

So

10.67/16.67 x 100

Now that gives you 64%.

So you reduced attrition rate by 64%. Note that it is different from the 70% we calculated

Yes it can be exhausting but you can learn over time or get a coach.

This is metric work. There are two other things we haven’t quantified and the Behind the scenes for

Slashed employee attrition rate by 64% for a workforce size of 50 after introducing 5 capacity building Programmes in the workplace.

Well that’s the result...

... it fits for your CV, for your LinkedIn, you can talk about it in your networking, your scholarship application for that organizational psychology role, your performance reviews ahead of that salary negotiation and so on.

You must do the groundwork.

Scholarship application for the Organisational psychology programme**

How do you measure employees been safe at work? How do you measure feelings?

It’s so impossible. How? HOW?!

You need a survey. Employee survey flying left, center, back, front. This is something that they can measure from surveys.

The survey is a tool that will help your respondents measure quantitatively to questions like

On a scale of 1-10 how safe do you feel at XYZ org.?

Quite simplistic but you can have other questions to help in your assessments.

Your company does not have this system? As an HR person, pick up that problem and solve it. Document it using the same process listed previously. Introducing the tool itself is an achievement

Using the tool to achieve a quantified CHANGE is the mega achievement. That is what employers will pay you for.

This is why I love jobs that give me the chance to implement my ideas. That is one of the first things I look for in a job.

If you’re a sales executive, How much improvement have you brought in on quarterly or annual revenue? Measure using percentages and document them.

It goes on and on and on. If you aren’t sure how to document, seek a coach. I’m one 😉 I know @MomentsWithBren too.
It’s worth it.

Last thing I should touch on is targets or KPIs. I highlighted that in the HR example but let me mention it again. KPIs are set for the organisation. Clear goals they want to achieve. See how your work fits in there and how you’re contributing to these KPIs.

A company may say we want to reduce our customer response time to less than 24hours.

As an administrative assistant, ask yourself, how does your work feed into this KPI and how do I measure the output of my work to match up with this KPI? That is the ownership mindset

Owning your job and boosting your confidence in the process.

You can also have targets for yourself that may not necessarily be organisational KPIs. Those are personal KPIs. Document them and record how well you are meeting/exceeding them using percentages

In the end, you should be able to communicate your value with numbers
I. Show how much work you have done by quantifying countable nouns
II. Use percentages to quantify change that you led after solving a problem, exploiting an opportunity or improving a business process

III. Use percentages to measure how well you have exceeded, met or maintained personal and organisational KPI.

and this will help you articulate your value to people you engage with.

Got questions, hit my DMs

Thanks for reading 🥲🥲🥲😃

Would you want a clubhouse discussion on this aspect of personal branding?

I call it “Behind the Scenes”😃

Let me know please.

#CarryYourCareer

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