How many KPIs can be assigned to a individual employee

Dear Vinoy, This is an excellent question. To answer we need to make clear one thing – we create KPIs not just to measure them. How does a good KPI appear? First there is some business context (business goal), and then there are indicators (a pair of leading and lagging indicators) that help us to track the goal (track the progress towards a target or at least monitor it and tell us that everything works smoothly). From the statement above we can make a conclusion:

• The number of indicators depends on the number of business goals;
• If we have 100+ KPIs, but there are no goal formulated, then, that’s wrong (imagine that one see an airplane dashboard, but have no clue about how to fly).

So, I would re-phrase the question to “How many goals can be assigned to an individual employee?” In this case we have plenty of material to read about…. Depending on goals complexity it can be 1-2 goals, or 100+ in a case of busy small business owner. The golden mean however, is somewhat around 3-5, and some authors suggest to focus on 1 goal only, but try to achieve excellence it in.