Have you ever had something you really needed/wanted your employees to adapt to? A change you really believed in, but it just wouldn’t stick?

For years we’ve begged, beat, and bribed our employees to track their hours with very frustrating results. We did not want them to prove they were working but rather to ensure they were not over-working on a project, make sure we were billing properly, and determine the hours used on various projects. No matter our pleas, bargains, or threats, the results each month were disappointing at best.

Our project management application, Basecamp, allows us to log hours on various projects. To make it even easier we built an application that extracted hours out of Basecamp and sent an email with total hours logged to the employee at the end of the day as a reminder. Still poor results.

Last month we put up a “scoreboard” in the office that is transparent to everyone. The board includes key performance metrics and employee hours logged for the month (by person with their mug shot.)

Would you believe that people can log their hours? And do so now! Amazing… shows the power of the scoreboard! But why did the scoreboard work when everything else we tried had failed?

There is an underlying accountability through the scoreboard. Team members can encourage one another to up their individual score. It creates internal competitions, and there is easily accessible data to support all of it. A basketball game is no fun at all when you are just “playing for fun” without keeping score. People are intrinsically motivated by the power of the scoreboard. Okay, so we also included prizes when scoreboard goals are met.

What are you visually measuring in your office?