Dashboards are so important to businesses of all sizes. Those dashboards can be as simple or as complex as need be. It is difficult to communicate to your employees how their actions impact your revenue and profitability without some tools that measure results. Dashboards are one of those tools.
I worked with a client a few years back, who was doing all the right things. There was open communication all the way to the CEO level. A committee worked on getting employees together outside of work to better know and understand one another. Part of the performance review at years end looked at and rewarded examples of competencies and behaviors that demonstrated respect for individuals and teamwork. Yet they were not meeting their revenue and profit goals. They had missed their bonus target for several years. The employees felt like the bonus was something that they could not achieve and it was impacting their value of teamwork. The executive team asked me to look at their compensation plan and see if there was something they were missing.
I reviewed their current plan. I spoke to the heads of each department to get a sense of duties, responsibilities, work flow, etc. After several days, I discovered that the employees wanted to do the right things to increase top line revenue and profit, but some were unsure of how their contributions impacted either of those, and some of the teams actually had targets that worked against the other departments.
By aligning the financial goals with the key accountabilities of individual contributors, AND with those in other departments they were able to meet their target and pay out those bonuses!
Communicating and sharing your results, good or bad, allows your employees to help you improve those results. Measure the results that are most important right now. Each business moves through expansion stages and the needs related to that stage change.
Stay tuned, we will discuss how you can identify where you are in that expansion and what to measure to achieve your profit goals.