In today's corporate landscape, businesses are increasingly recognizing the importance of their social impact. Companies are no longer solely evaluated based on their financial performance; stakeholders and customers now want to know how they contribute to society. To understand the real impact a company has on its employees, especially in relation to reducing the wealth gap between employees and shareholders, our team has been tasked with developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Part of the KPI development has involved conducting employee interviews, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the various positions within the company, employee satisfaction, and general trajectory of the company. In this blog post, I will share my firsthand experience of engaging in this process through my role as a team member on my project.
In order to establish a good relationship with our client, our team prioritized interacting with the client in person. It was important for us to narrow down exactly what our role as consultants for our client would be, while simultaneously working to mitigate scope creep, something I mentioned in my previous blog post. Working with the client in person certainly helped us to navigate the intricacies of our initial task, while providing us with more clarity regarding the scope of the project, and the direction we wanted to take it in. After conducting employee interviews, new metrics to assess employee satisfaction and determine the social impact of the company were illuminated. Yet we have also realized that there may not be a “fix all” solution to the problems we’ve uncovered. Thus, the next stage of our project will seek to evaluate the most effective KPIs and implementation parameters given what we know.
Presenting our findings to our client may be difficult — our team has been struggling to determine how to present critiques of the client’s company in a way that is constructive and not overly critical. We are still trying to determine how some of our findings should be structured to best achieve this goal, as we recognize that maintaining an amicable relationship with our client will ensure our project continues to move forward in a productive and positive direction.