Only the initial setup takes up larger amounts of time. This is due to the information being entered and setting up initial achievements for each employee. Once staff are entered into the system, each ongoing performance review should take only 10 minutes.

These should be ongoing. Scorecards should be provided on at least a bi-weekly or monthly basis. This helps ensure that your staff receive meaningful feedback in a timeframe that allows them to make improvements. These performance improvements should result in higher revenues, lower costs of operation, improved safety, or a mix of these three.

A scorecard is a tool used to provide objective and meaningful feedback to employees in an ongoing fashion. Be done with obscure feedback that doesn't produce results. Scored achievements are behaviorally defined and shared with the employee so they know exactly what is expected of them. The items being scored are tied to organizational outcomes or specific employee outcomes as it relates to their job performance. These pinpoints, as they are called, are key to the organization and when employees are performing at optimal levels, these pinpoints result in a healthier and more productive organization.

The practice of pinpointing clarifies for performers what specific behaviors to do more of, less, or differently. Pinpointing is the essential first step in effectively managing the most critical behaviors driving your business. If your employees don't know clearly what to do, this often results in unexpected or poor performance. See this article by Aubrey Daniels to read more about pinpointing.

At the end of the day, these don't move the needle much on their own. These scorecards need to be tied to specific outcomes themselves. This means a reinforcement system needs to be devised. While these are often monetary in nature, they don't need to be. When first starting a scorecard system, you'll want to get buy-in from your employees and this requires asking questions like: if you were to perform at 90% or better over a 3 month period, what would you want to earn within reason? While this is fine in some orgs, in others management may want to offer only a select few items and let the employee choose once they've hit thier goals. In either case, the most important aspect of using a scorecard is that praise and reinforcement occurs for optimal performance, corrective feedback occurs for poor performance.