Formula help

[kurtsimonw]

My brother's just become a manager and wants his staff to start taking it in turns using this tablet thing as a till on a Saturday for a 5 hour period. So one member of staff uses it each week. The staff hate using it because it means they actually have to do their job better and walk around rather than standing behind the counter, so he's trying to find a formula to reward who does the most work.

He says that the amount of people that you serve is more important than the total number of items you sell, but also says that selling more items obviously means you're still working. So selling 10 items to 1 person is harder work than selling 1 item each to 2 people. Then also because each person is working a different Saturday, someone serving 10 out of 20 people is better than serving 20 out of 100.

Any idea on a formula he can use to try and work this stuff out? and then what would the final number at the end of said formula actually represent so he can explain it to his employees.

Cheers

[V01]

Depends how complex he wanted to be. 

 

Start with x equalling the amount of people served and y equalling items sold. Use t to denote total customers and i to denote total items sold. 

 

That would leave with something like this:

 

p = x/t + y/i where p denotes productivity. 

 

It should remain equally fair as long as the number of customers or items sold doesn't vary too massively week to week. 

 

 

[kurtsimonw]

Cheers mate. He didn't think total items would be as relevant, but it seems to come up with the numbers in the kind of rank order he'd expect, so that should work for now.

[Mandy Lifeboats]

I use a simple system called the balanced scorecard. 

Define several criteria you want to measure. For instance the simplest criteria would be customers served and items sold. 

Then produce league tables for each of those criteria. The overally rating being your average position in each of those league tables. 

You may even decide that those criteria need to be based on average values such as customers served per hour worked. 

This system tends to reward people who have a balanced approach. 

If one criteria is deemed to be exceptionally important simply give it a weighting factor when calculating the balanced score card. 

I have found this works well. People who are regularly at the bottom of all criteria stand out like a sore thumb and are "encouraged" to improve performance. But it also prevents people chasing after one performance measure whilst ignoring all the others. 

In footballing terms, it allows you to compare a defender, midfielder and striker even though they contribute in different ways to a team goal (pun intended).