Empower People with Actionable Information
D
ata is great, but don’t forget that people are the agents of change. It’s your people who take the actions that bring about improvements. If you want your staff to take the right actions, you have to empower them with
understandable data. You have to give them actionable information that is relevant to the work they do and you can’t overwhelm them with too much data. You want to give them timely feedback on their performance, and here are some of the best ways to do that:
• Devise a playbook— Football coaches use playbooks to help them handle everything that might arise in games. You can build a playbook for your business by focusing on specific KPIs for each member of your staff or each department, establishing rules for handling certain situations, and setting up goals.
• Focus on specific KPIs for each person or department—Give people information that pertains directly to the work they do. Don’t give the billing clerks detailed data on safety inspections. Sort and configure the data so that you can create customized reports for your staff. You can use the “Permissions” tool to make specific sets of data available to some people and not others.
• Establish rules—Rules provide people with guidelines for taking action. If your fuel surcharges are too low, you might establish a rule that says dispatchers must check with a manager before approving any fuel surcharge under 11%.
• Set up goals—Settle on realistic goals for everyone and make sure they can see their progress towards those goals.
• Use graphics—You can use graphic tools, such as pie charts, bar charts, graphs, and gauges to create visual representations of the numbers. These can be powerful aids because they communicate the message more clearly and dramatically. For example, gauges allow people to see the effect of what they’re doing. When their hard work moves the needle, it’s more satisfying than simply seeing the numbers change.
• Get rid of the independent spreadsheets—You want to make sure your people are getting rid of their legacy spreadsheets and using LoadMaster for all of their records. There should be one central location for all of your data. You don’t want any data left out, because you want to know that you’re seeing a comprehensive and exhaustive view of every situation whenever you view metrics. This way, everyone works with the same data.
• Create a culture of improvement and get everyone on board— Following metrics should
become part of the business culture. Make it fun by celebrating individual and group success. If you’re starting this from scratch, give people time to warm up to it. Years ago when I managed operations at a trucking company, I first started putting KPIs in front of my staff by using a white board which had only four metrics—rate per mile, number of loads, total revenue, and deadhead. That was all I started watching at first. Gradually I added more KPIs, but I needed a place to start. I wanted to get people to understand those four things. I would update the whiteboard every hour and ring a bell. At first, they didn’t take much interest and they thought the bell was a dumb idea, but pretty soon, they started looking at the board every time I changed the numbers. I got them involved in the game.
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