As 2025 rolls in, we want to give you, our readers, a little treat. We scoured our database and took a good long look at the articles we published in 2024 to come up with a list of what stood out the most and resonated with you each month of last year. Entry into the prestigious list was determined using three criteria: value (how informative and useful the article is to the strategy and performance management community), readability (how easy it is to understand the thesis and concepts presented within), and reach (how widely the article was viewed). Without further ado, here are the top 12 Performance Magazine web articles for 2024.
Beyond Remote Work: Insights and Strategies for Enhancing Employee Productivity and Performance
Promoting diverse work options is important because enabling employees to work in ways that align with their preferences is essential for maintaining and boosting productivity.
Key Safety Considerations for Generative AI Adoption in Business
With the advancement of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), security risks are becoming a growing concern. What precautions should organizations take to protect their data before adopting GenAI?
Leveraging Effective Performance Management Systems for Real Estate Success
A robust performance management system (PMS) is key to cultivating a high-performance culture. How can real estate companies tailor their PMS to align with their goals and secure a competitive advantage?
Establishing a data team from scratch can seem daunting due to its complexity—considering there is no one-size-fits-all solution. What key areas should organizations focus on to truly build a strong data team?
Business Process Reengineering: The Path to Maximum Efficiency
Business process re-engineering is a strategic approach that reshapes and optimizes workflows to boost efficiency and agility in the evolving business landscape.
Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs), according to the State of Strategy Management Practice Global 2023 Report, ranks as the second most significant obstacle in strategy planning.
How Data-Ink Ratio Imposed Minimalism on Data Visualization
Data-ink ratio seeks to maximize the proportion of informative elements in a chart, with a ratio of 1 being the ultimate goal. It only includes data-representing elements, free of decorations or redundancies.
Rethinking Business Ecosystems Part 1: What Systemic Issues Are Undermining Your Holistic Growth?
Leaders must foster innovation within the business ecosystem due to the unpredictable global market and growing societal expectations—allowing them to identify gaps and develop relevant solutions.
The State of Sustainability Reporting: Key Insights for Businesses
The sustainability report, as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) CEO Eelco van der Enden puts it, “is the end of a long journey of transactions and actions that define the company’s approach to sustainability.”
Do ESG Strategies and Performance Measurement Truly Matter to Sectoral Investors?
As environmental awareness grows, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies are gaining more importance in the investment community. Thus, industry-specific KPIs become all the more crucial to implement effective sustainability measures.
How Strategy Management in MENA Is Shaping Up: Key Insights from TKI’s 2024 Report
Organizations in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are adapting their strategic approaches to navigate current challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
Charting a Course: A Step-by-Step Guide to Deliberate Strategic Planning
Deliberate strategic planning is a methodical approach where organizations set clear objectives and craft strategies to achieve them. It thrives in a stable environment, ensuring alignment between goals and actions.
“What constitutes a good KPI example?”, “How should KPIs be measured?”, “Which KPI is suitable for our organization?”, and “How well will employees understand and participate in tracking these KPIs?” These questions often loom large for companies seeking to select the right KPIs to accurately measure their performance and progress toward strategic objectives.
According to The KPI Institute’s (TKI) State of Strategy Management Practice Global Report – 2023, choosing the right KPIs ranks as the second most significant obstacle in strategy planning.
The report further reveals a concerning trend regarding the challenges associated with working with KPIs. Results indicate a surge in the hurdles associated with KPI selection compared to the previous year.
Several factors contribute to the challenging nature of KPI selection, including the need to align with strategic objectives; the common practice of defining initiatives before KPIs rather than defining KPIs and targets first and then developing initiatives to reach them; clearly differentiating between strategic and operational KPIs at the departmental level; and focusing too much on task-related KPIs rather than impact KPIs at the employee level.
3 stages of KPI selection
Selecting the right KPIs requires careful planning, analysis, and collaboration across various organizational areas. A rigorous KPI selection process typically involves three major stages (see Figure 1).
Your initial step in the process is to set a clear direction for KPI selection by recognizing the business objectives and goals that must be attained. This is essential to ensure that all personnel are working towards the same objectives and that progress can be efficiently monitored. This stage clarifies the necessity and application of measurement while precisely defining the intended purpose of the KPIs.
Next, conduct thorough research to gather a range of KPI examples. This serves a dual purpose: educating your internal stakeholders and fostering meaningful discussions about KPIs. This process, labelled as the KPI expo, entails compiling a comprehensive list of KPIs that will later be filtered based on a set of criteria.
You should review both internal and external data sources (see Figure 2) to leverage existing practices while also gaining insights into industry best practices. The KPI expo can include existing KPI lists from various organizational levels, which may already be in use or have been tested within your organization.
In the next stage, use intelligence gathering and conduct workshops to identify suitable KPIs. You can obtain insights from a diverse range of stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, employees, and management. This approach will foster broader buy-in and support.
TKI recommends the following selection methods to ensure the identification of relevant KPIs:
Question framing: Guide discussions toward relevant contexts and gather participant perspectives. Questions might include, “How many KPIs should we select?” or “What is the procedure for validating the selected KPIs?”
Value flow analysis: Examine the flow of value within business processes—from inputs to outcomes—to understand how objectives can be measured from different perspectives.
KPI balancing: Avoid narrow perspectives by selecting at least two complementary KPIs per objective, ensuring the measurement of both quantity and quality, subjectivity and objectivity, and efficiency and effectiveness.
Additionally, among the existing criteria in practice, TKI suggests using these five to ensure KPI relevancy:
Measurable: Can the KPI result be quantified?
Accessible: Can your organization feasibly gather the necessary data?
Specific: Does the KPI address a specific issue you have?
Actionable: Does it provide information for decision-making?
Balanced: Does it reflect various facets of performance?
The final stage in the KPI selection process involves monitoring the selected KPIs for necessary recalibrations. This can be achieved through two key activities: KPIs documentation and the performance review meeting.
KPI documentation can reveal limitations associated with data collection or reporting and gaps in the cost-benefit analysis of the KPI’s usage. Develop a comprehensive set of information for each selected KPI to facilitate data collection, reporting, and analysis.
Use a standard template, known as a KPI documentation form (see Figure 3), capturing each KPI’s details, definition, calculation formula, target, data source, reporting frequency, KPI owner, and data custodian. For more examples, you can explore TKI’s comprehensive repository of KPIs at smartKPIs.com.
The first reporting and performance review meeting for the new KPIs will reveal their utility for decision-making. It provides managers with an overview of how the KPIs cover all aspects of the business and helps identify necessary adjustments to the corporate scorecard, ensuring that the most relevant data is available for decision-making. Facilitate this first meeting through your strategy office.
After this final stage, your KPIs can be maintained as initially selected, recalibrated and updated, or even phased out of use based on their effectiveness and relevance to your organizational goals.
By following these stages, you can select and implement KPIs that accurately measure performance and support strategic objectives, ultimately driving your business success and growth.
Ready to take your KPI selection to the next level? Head over to the KPI section on our website for more in-depth articles and expert advice.
Designing and implementing a Performance Management System (PMS) based on performance measurement tools such as key performance indicators (KPIs) is a thorough step-by-step process. It requires effective management of all the phases of the implementation process and proper allocation of responsibilities to all the stakeholders involved. With this, the KPI implementation project plan lays emphasis on conducting KPI selection workshops.
Whether or not the PMS within your organization is comprehensive, KPIs can be measured across organizational layers: Corporate/Organizational, Divisional, Departmental, or Individual/Employee levels in accordance with the organizational context. For these performance indicators to be measured in standardized tools, such as a balanced scorecard, they need to be selected, and such selection should occur during dedicated meetings.
Such meetings require the attendance of specifically allocated stakeholders to provide constructive insights and foster a corporate community culture based on continuous improvement. As a line of practice, the participants of these workshops hold positions, such as department heads, strategists, performance analysts, members of the performance management office, and allocated members of the Board, all based on their availability. Note that other members could attend the workshops as per company practice. Attendance at these important meetings requires an invitation, though.
The invitation is a crucial, pre-workshop phase, as it sets the tone, pace, and mindset of the delegates who will join the event. Such invitation is generally in the form of an email with quite some content and attached materials. The email aims to provide contextualization and reasoning behind the request to certain members of the organization to attend the workshops. It is a request that comes from the Strategy Office or the Performance Management Office or whoever oversees the Performance Management practices in the organization, at least two to three weeks in advance of the date of the event.
What should be included in the KPI selection workshops invitation?
Brief introduction about the upcoming workshop;
Logistical information such as date, time, and location of the event;
Detailed KPI selection workshop agenda;
Reading materials and corporate documentation attached
What are the key documents to be attached to mentally prepare our participants and make this workshop a success?
As a line of practice, it is recommended to share educational materials, prepared by the Performance Management Office, related to KPI selection, KPI Alignment practices, and Performance Measurement and Management tools. The delegates, whether or not they are practitioners in the field, are invited to go through the materials;
Strategic and Performance Management tools linked to previous performance cycles, such as Corporate Strategy Plan, Organizational Scorecards, Dashboards, and Portfolio of Initiatives, must be included.
In certain organizational contexts, a written note from top management and C-Suites may be added in order to highlight one factor: The involvement and support of top management in the design and implementation of the framework. This note could be very beneficial buy-in wise as well.
Setting the right tone and mindset in preparation for the workshop is very much advised. The delegates, especially after the workshops occur, will act as champions in disseminating knowledge and replicating the KPI best practices in their respective departments. Furthermore, it will support the ultimate purpose of securing the much-required buy-in from middle managers and employees across departments towards the PMS design.
If you would like to learn more about KPI selection practices and the follow-up activities to the KPI selection workshops, we kindly invite you to sign up for The KPI Institute’s Certified KPI Professional and Practitioner training course. It will lead you through all the phases of the KPI implementation project plan.
According to a poll conducted by The KPI Institute on LinkedIn, Selecting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) has been highlighted as the most difficult aspect in deploying KPIs, with more than 50% of respondents choosing this option when asked: “What is the most challenging aspect in working with KPIs?”.
Do ESG Strategies and Performance Measurement Truly Matter to Sectoral Investors?
