Consider these: A firm publicises its efforts on corporate social responsibility. Another boasts of the amount of training it provides employees. Your child says she spent hours preparing for an exam. An educational institution highlights the number of attendees at a conference. The government emphasises resources allocated for a social initiative. What’s common to all of them? All emphasise inputs — be it resources, effort, or behaviour.
None discusses the relevant outcomes that are expected or realised. Most of us would agree that outcomes count, not inputs. But organisations and individuals tend to use inputs to convey the relevance, importance or value of their programmes and projects. Worse, often it is not simply inputs that are extolled, but also growth in them. For example, the increase in money spent on corporate social responsibility over the previous year.
Never mind that the previous year may not have produced the desired outcomes. If outcomes matter, we should not be satisfied with input-based reporting. Hard questions must be asked. For example, what is the outcome of the firm’s corporate social responsibility efforts? And, is the outcome acceptable for the invested efforts? Even better, the focus should go beyond outcomes, and address the obvious next question: What is the ultimate impact produced?
GO BEYOND OUTCOMES:
Impact can be loosely defined as the effect or influence of an outcome. Thus, if the objective of corporate social responsibility efforts is to provide schooling to all children in a particular village, then one obvious outcome would be the percentage increase in high school graduates in that village. On the other hand, the real impact could be enhanced economic well-being of families in the village. The challenge in focusing on impact is its measurement. How does one measure effects that may be complex, and sometimes unclear and intangible. However, this challenge should not dissuade one from attempting to measure impact, because with some basic understanding of issues, useful and relevant impact measurement can be made. Simple guidelines can lead to useful impact measurements:
HAVE CLARITY ON THE OBJECTIVE:
The more clear the objective of the programme, project, initiative, (or other effort), the easier it is to measure impact. Thus, saying that the objective of a training programme is to make participants “better” managers is not as useful as specifying that the training programme is designed to improve manager productivity, or improve morale, or improve team work.
FOCUS ON OBSERVABLES:
Any meaningful objective will have observable effects or consequences. Thus, there will be observable consequences from improved productivity, morale or teamwork. Choose observables that are relevant for an objective, and track them.
DECOMPOSE, IF NEEDED:
Not all objectives will produce simple, readily available, observable consequences. Often, decomposing complex objectives into its components will make things easier to measure. For example, “improving teamwork” can be decomposed into measureable components like level of team member participation, number of internal conflicts resolved, or time taken to resolve internal conflicts in the team. The bottom line is, we should not be satisfied with information on “inputs” to decide the importance or value of programmes, projects, and initiatives. However challenging it may be, there should be efforts taken to measure impact, based on clearly defined objectives. Such an approach forces accountability, leads to increased transparency, and most important, ensures that rewards and accolades are based on results. (Arun Pereira teaches at the Indian School of Business and heads the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Case Development at the institute)
This article was taken from here.