What’s Your "Plumb Line?"

Every night, I read a devotional to my 8-year-old daughter, Maddy. Normally, the devotions don’t usually hit me in terms of business applications, but one that I recently read did. The story dealt with a plumb line.  It began with a son asking his father why the wallpaper, that had a blue stripe on it, was crooked in his bedroom. The father suggested that it might not be the wallpaper, but the wall itself. So the father took a piece of string, tied a washer to the end of it, thus making a plumb line, and hung it from the ceiling corner down to the floor. Sure enough, the string grew steadily further away from the corner of the wall, until it reached the floor where they measured it out to be an inch away.

A plumb line can be used to make sure that something is hung straight or built correctly, whether that something is a wall, a fence or even a large portrait. Businesses and organizations require all sorts of plumb lines in order to measure money, sales, marketing campaigns, but you also need to measure your most important asset, employees. Even if your business just has a handful of employees, a company still needs to “measure” the staff. What "plumb line" are you using to measure employees? You may say “Well, we have system reports that show us productivity levels, which will tell if we are getting the job done or not.” True, but system reports only paint you a portion of the picture. Your productivity is affected by so many factors; processes could be flawed, a machine may not be operating correcting, or you experience a sudden increase or decrease in workload, etc. So how do you measure the effectiveness of your employees? Perhaps the best method is by using assessments, employee engagement surveys and benchmarking. A productivity report is “system” generated, where as an assessment or survey and thus a benchmarking report is “human” generated. These reports will help you to know what makes your workers tick, what kind of battery they are running on, and if they are happy and satisfied with their jobs. Assessments and benchmarking will also provide a company with a way to measure potential employees.  In fact, not only are there assessments and surveys for the front-line workers, but there are also assessments and surveys for the management side of the equation as well.

To sum it all up, you need that “plumb line” to find out if it’s the wall or the wallpaper that is the issue, so that you will simply know which one to correct. You need that same “plumb line” in business so that you know what is working well and what is broken. It is vital to the success of any organization to measure the people, without that measurement one will never truly know where a potential issue lies or how to improve. This can be done through assessments, employee engagement surveys and benchmarking. The best thing is that you don’t have to be in it alone. There are people who are more than willing to step in and lend a helping hand to step up on the ladder and hang that “plumb line” and then work at getting the wallpaper straight or if need be, fixing the wall.

If you like the article and are intrigued and would like to talk more about it, feel free to send me an email at ryank@maxpt.us.