The benefits of a simple metric are clear; every day employees in our company can tabulate and understand their collective impact towards a variety of social initiatives.
According to Bob Willard, "There are too many indicators in play. We need to get our act together and identify a critical subset of indicators that are material to important stakeholders, including the environment, society, and shareholders."
If metrics don’t add value, they will not support continual improvement and eventually will not be used. It’s a vicious cycle that can be avoided if the proper system is firmly implanted in organizational strategy and operations.