Companies that enroll their team members in the “game” of their business, in 2 to 3 big levers that create success or failure, have more engaged employees and better profitability. This might be described as dashboard engagement.
Dashboard engagement is a term I’m making up, but play along with me for a minute. Look at your organization and determine the 2-3 areas of focus this year that would drive sales up or improve profitability. Perhaps these would be customer retention, or reducing freight costs, or lower rework.
Making it a measurable company goal, with regular dashboard reporting would be the “game”. If the company achieves its target, everyone participates in the reward.
Let’s take rework. Rework could be an invoice that the customer claims is wrong. As your Customer Service team digs in, they find that the Sales person quoted the price wrong, or the warehouse filled the order wrong. You start tracking and fixing the areas where you have repeated errors. Well, you are all now engaged in fixing the problem so you all can get a piece of your reduced costs.
The most important components of picking a lever point are:
- It must be measurable,
- It must require the cooperation of more than one department to fix it so buy-in is large, and
- It must matter.
If we aren’t clear with our team about what really drives success in our organization, they will work very hard at whatever they think is most important. And, if they are not focusing on what is important to us, is that their fault?
Give them clear goals and I bet they will eat up the challenge. Give them weekly feedback about the progress. And have regular team rewards. It could be a pizza party. Make it a game and may you – the best team – win.
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