Organization Visibility
Posted on 02 December 2008
Organization visibility is a big goal of mine for next year. This is not a new concept and it certainly is not my idea. I believe when things are going great companies tend to keep their employees less accountable.
Today, “we the people”, received notice that we are in an official recession. Like “we” didn’t realize that. I believe now more than ever employees need to be working at 100% capacity and everything they do should be tracked and accounted for. There is no room for redundancies or employees not willing give you their all. I have never received so many job applications in my 9 years of running mobileStorm than I have in the last two months. What does this mean? Well it means there is a lot of talent out there and people who really want to work. To ensure everyone is kicking ass, you need visibility. This can be achieved through KPI reports.
I am currently working with all my managers and employees to create KPI reports, or Key Performance Indicators. We keep things simple and track everything in excel. This report should be collaborative and agreed upon by your employee and you. What you want out of this report is tracking on all your employees key activities on a weekly basis. You should also set monthly quotas or goals. You want to be able to track how much activity is happening, while also tracking if goals are met. For example the head of my Client Services division has a KPI report that consists of “# of support issues”, and “how people are contacting us (i.e. phones, email, chat etc..)”. Not only do I want to track all of the activity but I want to see this on a week-by-week basis, so I can see any potential trends. Why did we get an abnormal spike in phone calls last week? Did we have system issues? Should we try and push people more to email and chat since phone support costs more money? Also one of the goals might be to reduce the time to chat from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. Did he make this goal? If not, why? These are just a few reports (or lines) on the KPI report but you can see how important it is to track everything and show it over a period of time. Each one of his reports is responsible for their own KPI, and ultimately he compiles one large report and has that ready for me to review, which we also use in board meetings.
Every employee should be accountable. Just make sure the reports mean something and they help you make decisions. If you have having them track every little thing, it is going to take away from their overall productivity.
Jared Reitzin
Small Business Help
Very enthusiastic and motivational. I find this post very good, and I will definately reference it for future readings aswell. I will also digg this, for the convenience of having other people finding a useful article on businesses of your kind.
The main idea of it is understandable, but I still think their are some changes that would be required for it to work.
Thanks,
Tommy Vile, http://www.VariousTopics.com
Very interesting post. I'm curious to see what the results of the data collected will turn out like and where you will go from there.
KPI have really helped many of my clients. Great post!
Sharon what do you use to track the progress?
Informative post & is really recommendable for all.
What a concept – employee accountability LOL. I certainly hope employers and managers of large firms read this post.
BP, you would be surprised. Everyone needs a results oriented work environment but its really hard to do if you are a micro manager. Likewise it's hard to track results if you don't manage enough.
Very nicy……. you know, Sometime We come up with a great idea that will give us success but drop it before it has been properly executed to go on to the next big thing or something that’s more exciting. We always want to be occupied with the next big thing! We lack Focus unless we specifically and consciously “decide to focus”.
Roger, KPIs have worked well for us this year. There are some kinks and ways that I think they could be run better. I am working those out so in 2011 everything runs smoothly.