Improving performance and reporting it to management helps you get the promotions you desire. You monitor your progress more effectively if you make a chart graphing your expected, targeted, and actual performance. A chart or graph visually communicates your improvements to you, your supervisors, and others.
What Should You Chart
Each job will measure something different. We discussed metrics in a previous post. Hopefully, you identified the important metrics for your job if you followed our suggestions.
You probably need to maintain multiple charts. First, you chart the metrics for each of the following measurement criteria:
- Productivity metrics: how much you produce
- Efficiency metrics: how much time, money, or materials do you use for production
- Effectiveness metrics: how well does what you accomplish its intended purpose
- Quality metrics: the degree of excellence or shoddiness of the performance
Second, you chart:
- What management expects you to perform in each of the areas listed above
- Your target to exceed what management expects
- Your actual performance for each of the metrics identified
How to Make Your Charts
Several methods of making charts exist:
- Manual graphs: you can use graph paper to manually make a chart
- Google Spreadsheets: you can graph your metrics for free using Google documents
- Microsoft Excel spreadsheet: you must buy MS Excel to graph performance this way
A line graph will display your metrics better than a bar or other type of chart. You create a separate graph for each metric because each graph will chart three measurements.
The details of your graph will include:
- Time (days, weeks, or months) along the bottom line of the graph
- Performance metrics along the vertical or left side of the graph
- One row (line) of the table will contain expected performance data
- Another row (line) of the table will contain data of your goals
- Final row (line) of the table will contain your actual data performance
- Data labels if you wish
Wednesday we begin to explore the next step in getting a promotion—fit into the organization
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