Accountability by Greg Bustin

Author:Greg Bustin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2014-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

NOT EVERYTHING CAN BE COUNTED

Your first decision about tracking performance is determining what to track.

“I regularly remind myself,” say Nucor’s Ray Napolitan, “of the quote, ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’

“So while we track lots of information, we don’t want to get hung up too much on metrics because we can measure some things quantifiably and some things not so much.”

Does the personal development of your employees matter? How do you track it? What about other intangibles such as employee engagement, morale, and pride?

“People want to be a part of something successful, something big,” says Napolitan. “Consider a welder, for instance, and he or she understands that what they do really does make a difference. If that welder makes a mistake—it could hurt or kill someone—and that’s making a difference in a negative way. And when they see that they play a role in providing roof structures and floor structures, that’s a positive difference. How does their work fit into a project so that it’s not just a product on a welding table? It’s our job as leaders to connect that. We explain ‘the why.’ Taking time to help people understand why we do what we do and track what we track is hard work. But it’s fun.”

Sales, revenue, and profitability indicators are important for any company. High-performing companies track sales, they share those numbers enterprise-wide, and they watch other indicators to gauge the mood of the troops.

The Container Store provides sales information every day to every employee, posting daily reports company-wide. The company owns the elfa manufacturing business in Sweden, which accounts for about 24 percent of annual sales, so sales of that bestselling product are measured every day. Turnover, sales per payroll hour, and conversion rates also are tracked.

Having fun is a big part of The Container Store’s success. “We also watch things that aren’t on a spreadsheet,” says Casey Shilling. “We call it the fun-o-meter. Walking around and having conversations with people measures a lot. You can tell a lot about an organization by how people are feeling when you sit down with them, have an open door policy, and look people in the eye.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.