We have noticed that as soon as we put a weekly activity metric on our scorecard, our team starts finding ways to hit the target on paper while the actual quality of their work plummets. How do we structure our scorecard metrics so that our team cannot game the numbers to look good while the business suffers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When team members game their weekly scorecard numbers, it is usually because you are tracking activities in isolation without measuring the quality or outcome of those activities. To stop this behavior, you must pair your activity-based leading indicators with a counter-balancing quality metric. If you only track the volume of sales calls made, your team will make quick, low-quality calls just to hit their weekly target. To prevent this, pair calls made with a second metric: qualified discovery meetings scheduled. If the calls are high but the meetings scheduled are low, you immediately expose the low quality of those calls during your Level 10 Meeting™. The same principle applies to service delivery. Do not just track tickets closed by your support team. Pair that number with customer satisfaction scores or first-contact resolution rates. If they are closing tickets without actually solving the client's problem, your quality metric will go red. This counter-balance makes your scorecard ungameable. It forces your team to focus on the actual output rather than just going through the motions to check a box. When you build these self-auditing pairs into your scorecard, you create an honest, objective pulse of your business operations.