I am a corporate in-house Credit & Collections manager, and I recently assumed the additional role of managing our Accounts Management Department. I am a person that likes to create standards, benchmarks, and measurable objectives. For my 16 collectors, this is easy - I measure total inbound/outbound calls, total cash collected, DSO #'s in each collector's queue, etc.

However, the 5 members of the Accounts Management team have a less tangible responsibility. They are tasked with responding to all correspondence that comes through our company, which includes researching accounts, cancelling invoices, initiating refunds, writing response letters, making outbound calls, etc. The problem is that I can't develop a standard that is fair or accurate. For instance, I can measure total adjustments initiated by each account manager, but that has little bearing on their actual production. I could measure total correspondence worked, but the issue there is that one employee may have a letter that requires 8 hours of research while another employee gets 8 letters that require 1 hour each. Under that system, there is no equality in the evaluation.

I really like to quantify performance and create uniform and fair standards for evaluating my employees. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!