Cover Story
Measuring sticks
How Linda Galipeau created performance indicators and engaged employees at Randstad US
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Atlanta | May 2010
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When Linda Galipeau took over Randstad US nearly two years ago, the recruitment company lacked key performance indicators, or KPIs for short.
“Before I came in, there were two big ones but oddly enough, they didn’t correlate with success,” the president says. “I know that’s very strange. One was very ‘amount of activity,’ and one was sort of ‘units sold,’ if you will.”
Both assumed that all activity was good activity and that everything else was done well.
“Since they had narrowed it down so much and said, ‘We’re going to assume that all of those have taken place, and we’re just going to push these two,’ you saw falling away of other KPIs, and since there were too few, you couldn’t measure the fallout of the chosen focus,” she says.
She suspects the thought process was to not give people too much information because then they’ll get lost in the details, so by focusing on just two areas, they’ll gain more traction in those areas.
“But what actually happened was kind of quite the opposite,” she says. “First of all, there wasn’t a lot of buy-in — people are pretty smart, and there wasn’t a lot of solid buy-in and adoption of the value of these KPIs. And there was constant change — if this didn’t work, then we’ll try this, so there was a constant changing of KPIs, and there wasn’t a fundamental buy-in. People weren’t engaged.”
To get things back on course and move the 1,600-person business forward, Galipeau decided that she had to set new KPIs and then get employees engaged in the business.
