Provide a chance to win
It wasn’t just the company that was threatened by the lack of order and structure to get things done. It was hard for employees to feel a sense of accomplishment when there was constantly another crisis to deal with.
So Volovar, who had seen scorecards work in other parts of the Molina organization, decided it was time for the Missouri unit to give them a shot.
“The whole purpose of that is every day, people can walk away from here understanding if they won today,” Volovar says. “We identify three of their top priorities or goals. We have them tally, track and trend those on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. We post those scorecards so that we can all see how each other is performing and how we are working together to meet our organizational goals.
“We also use that as a tool for mentoring as well as celebrating everybody’s successes. And it provides a very quick way to be able to tell if there is an area that we need to focus attention on to improve performance.”
The key to making a scorecard system work is to make it meaningful. It needs to be thought out and planned so that it accomplishes your goal of being able to better track when tasks are being completed.
“It has to be applicative to the individual that is developing it,” Volovar says. “In our network development area, we have staff that are responsible for obtaining contracts with new providers or renegotiating existing contracts. If there are 30 contracts that they need to either renew or develop during a particular month, every day, you can do a tick mark, or tally, for how many you were able to complete on a given day. So every day, that person is going to be able to see, did I win today? Did I meet my goal toward my overall goal of the 30 during that month?”
Determining what to track for each individual comes down to figuring out what the primary objective is for that individual’s position in the organization. This was another key point for Molina, being able to follow a job back to a specific individual, rather than trying to figure out who had a little extra time to chip in and get it done last week and who might be doing it this week.
“So if you manufacture widgets, how many widgets do you want to be able to manufacture in a month?” Volovar says. “In the manufacturing of the widgets, you would look at each component of the widget. Break it down into components and individual responsibilities. Here you have a widget and that widget is made up of five different components. There are 10 individuals responsible for the manufacturing of each one of those five components. You could have a scorecard for each individual that shows on a daily basis how many components of that widget did I manufacture on a given day?”
The idea behind the scorecarding method is to develop a coach-player rapport between the employee and the manager. In the case of Molina, it also created regular dialogue about each employee’s duties and how they could be best accomplished.
“During that coaching, you would review the three performance levels, which would be the performance standard, the end and the goal,” Volovar says. “You develop what is called an expectations and deliverable agreement for each player. You write up what your expectation is of their responsibility and accountability. You know and they know. You work with them to develop the scorecard, and we ask that our staff have 3 scorecards each. Then on a very regular basis, you review the scorecards. It’s important that you provide feedback and you share successes and celebrate with the team.”
When you see someone falling behind, you can work with the individual to develop a plan to get back on track and figure out what steps would help accomplish that.
“You agree on what the next steps are going to be to achieve,” Volovar says. “It’s important that you have very positive reviews. The scorecards really are a tool for management to change behavior and to provide regular feedback and goal setting. The most important thing is to coach and provide feedback. If you develop these scorecards based on what you hope to get from your staff, it really provides a great meaningful tool to review their business objectives and how they are moving toward achieving the business objectives on a regular basis. You could do it for anything. It takes a little time to think through it, but once you get into the habit of doing it, it just comes across easily.”