Moving company scorecards: what to count for movers and office staff.

A number is only useful to an employee if three things are true. They can check it themselves. It is counted the same way every week. And it comes from the jobs, not from how the manager felt on Friday.

Our Playbook on performance reviews splits every review into three parts: goals, core competencies, and role competencies. It also tells you not to score people 1 to 5, because nobody knows what a 3 means. Scorecards do not break that rule. They supply the first part. The two or three measurable goals a person carries into a review can come straight off their scorecard.

Six numbers per crew lead. The crew lead runs the job, so the job’s numbers go on the crew lead’s line.

Why divide by pounds? Because a raw count punishes the people who do the most work. Take two crew leads in the same month. The numbers are made up to show the point.

Count damage alone and B looks like the careful one. Measured against the work, A moves far more between mistakes. A crew lead who takes the big jobs should not look worse for taking them.

Use the weight from the estimate, since every job already has one. If you do not estimate weight on small local jobs, use estimated crew hours instead. Pick one measure and do not switch. When a crew lead has no damage in the period, show the pounds moved and a zero. That is a clean sheet, and it should look like one.

Some jobs have one crew lead at pickup and another at delivery. Decide once who gets the pounds and who gets a damage row on those jobs. Write the rule down and count it the same way every time.

“Damage” is too wide to act on. A code says what kind. Four groups cover almost everything a customer complains about on move day.

Only the two damage groups feed a number on the scorecard. Behaviour and Service rows still go against the crew lead who ran the job, and you read them every Monday for the code that repeats. They are not a seventh number.

A bad review is not a code. Log the review, then give it the code for what caused it. “Two stars” teaches you nothing. “Two stars, no call before arrival” is something you can fix.

Keep the list stable. When something does not fit, add a code. When a code goes a year without being used, remove it. Give every code a short number, so it fits in one column of the log.

A salesperson can book a lot of jobs and leave a mess behind each one. The mess lands on the crew and on customer service weeks later, when nobody connects it to the call that caused it. The sales scorecard makes that connection.

Closing rate, average job value, and response time still matter, and they still belong in the review. They measure how well a person sells. This scorecard measures what each sale costs the rest of the company. The codes are the things sales causes downstream:

Change the list to fit how you price. A company that sells every job at a flat rate will rarely need the first two.

Customers are not the only ones who see problems. Departments see each other’s problems every day. Most of it gets said once in the hallway and forgotten. Give that feedback codes too, and it lands in the same log.

The dispatch Playbook already has the dispatcher send what sales got wrong back to sales the same day. This is that habit with a code on it, so it can be counted. Dispatch uses the sales codes for it. It just sees the problem before the customer does.

Customer service and dispatch get a scorecard the same way sales does: jobs handled, issues logged against them, and jobs handled per issue.

None of this is a separate system. There is one log. Every complaint, every special case, every piece of feedback between departments, and every 5-star review gets one row, tied to a job number.

A special case is any job that needed an exception: a price changed after the move, a second trip, a customer handled outside the normal steps. Nobody complained, but it cost something, so it gets a row.

Damage the crew reports itself goes in as a complaint row the same day, before the customer has to bring it up.

Good news goes in the same log as bad news. A log that only holds complaints is a list of accusations, and people stop feeding it.

The scorecards are this log, counted. Filter by crew lead and count the damage rows. Filter by salesperson and count the sales codes. Nobody adds anything up by hand, and nobody argues about whose number is right, because every number opens into the rows behind it.

One person owns the log. Customer service is the natural owner, because they hear the complaint first. Everyone else can add to it.

1. 1

   Read it on the same day every week

   Monday morning, last week's entries and the rolling 30 days. Pick the day and keep it, so every reading covers one full week, Monday to Sunday.

2. 2

   Look for the code that repeats

   One code, once, is a bad day. The same sales code on three salespeople's jobs is a script problem. The same damage code on one crew is a training problem.

3. 3

   Change the system, then watch the code

   Rewrite the line in the script, add the field to the intake form, run the training. If the fix worked, that code stops showing up.

4. 4

   Bring the numbers to the review

   Each quarter, two or three numbers become that person's goals, taken from the scorecard where it has them. The competencies cover the rest.

The scorecards tell each person how they are doing. The owner needs two more views. Among the KPIs for a moving company, these are worth reading every month.

Per lead source, per month.

The last line decides where next month’s money goes. A source with cheap leads that never book loses to an expensive one that does.

Per job.

Jobs, people, log entries, and codes all point at each other. That is a database, not a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet works until two people edit the log at once or a formula breaks quietly, and all-in-one moving software counts what its makers decided to count. Your codes will change as your company changes, so the log belongs somewhere you can change it: Airtable.

A scorecard is easy to turn into a weapon. Once that happens, people stop feeding the log and the numbers stop meaning anything.

• A scorecard is a count of what happened on the jobs. It is never a 1 to 5 rating of a person.
• Movers: jobs, pounds moved, damage, pounds per damage, reviews, pounds per review.
• Divide by pounds moved, so the crew lead who does the most work is not punished for it.
• Show month to date and rolling 30 days, per crew lead and per branch, on a screen in the warehouse.
• Sales: jobs booked, amount sold, issues caused, amount sold per issue.
• Give every problem a code, including the ones departments cause each other.
• One log: every complaint, special case, piece of feedback between departments, and 5-star review, tied to a job number, with cost and date settled.
• When a code repeats, change the system. Bring two or three numbers to each quarterly review.
• No fines, no pay per review, no shaming leaderboards. Bonuses are for performance, never for the review count, and are your call.
• Build the log in Airtable, so the codes can change when the company does.