The piece below was written for and posted on the Green Building Advisor. I thought I’d share it here too.
We like to measure how we’re doing in as many ways as possible. Like other businesses, we have a collection of metrics for financial tracking: profit and loss, budget projections and actuals, job costing of each project, value of our several funds (pension, equity, and reserves) and more.
We also measure social factors: employee education costs, compensation ratio top to bottom, length of employee tenure, average employee age, charitable contributions, and community service.
We consistently track (measure) our work backlog to help us plan for our immediate future.
We try to predict our longer-term future, too – through strategic planning, creating five year plans, projecting organizational charts, and making succession plans.
In design and project planning, we do extensive measuring (space planning, engineering) to ensure good building performance, structure, and utility. On our completed projects, we monitor energy use and other factors (like relative humidity) to help us learn what works and what doesn’t.