STAGE 2 - Balanced Scorecard for Skills

BACKGROUND (Cont'd)

Kaplan and Norton suggest that an organization manage itself based on a series of metrics that are aligned with its vision and strategy. There are four categories of metrics:

1. Financial: what do we need to manage to be seen as successful in the eyes of our shareholders or other funders?
2. Customer: how do our customers perceive us?
3. Internal business: what business processes must we excel at to be perceived favourably by our customers and owners?
4. Learning and innovation: how do we sustain our ability to change and grow through workplace education and innovation?

These categories are inter-related and links can potentially be made from any one category to any other. For instance, workplace education may build the capacity of people to respond to customer needs, leading to greater customer satisfaction, higher market shares and more favourable financial results.

On the face of it, human resource professionals would appear to be most interested in the "learning and innovation" aspect of the Balanced Scorecard. Yet the inter-relationships between human resources and the achievement of other Balanced Scorecard objectives means that there are potentially many entry points for workplace education in the Balanced Scorecard. For instance, workplace education programs may support efforts to improve customer satisfaction by improving the listening skills of employees, so that they can accurately hear and respond to customer needs.