29 Jan What Gets Measured Gets Done! Four Essential Organisational Measures

Companies whose main measures are financial, will eventually see their finances suffer.

Having worked with many different companies in recent years, I’ve experienced a wide range of management approaches and styles.

I’ve noticed that one thing that sets successful and less successful companies apart, is what they measure and pay attention to.

Companies that mainly focus on just sales, cost and profit, can be relatively successful, especially early on, but cracks can start to appear with the cultural and health and well-being aspects of their operations.

These aspects aren’t typically measured, and problems remain undetected, they eventually translate into reduced sales, increased costs and will ultimately affect bottom line profit.

Let me give you an example;

Take a company that sells telecommunications solutions to other businesses. They have grown rapidly from 10 staff to 150 staff in two years.

They are tenacious sellers and typically their performance dashboard, includes; sales growth, revenue growth, customer growth and order growth.

Their approach has worked well. So well, that they have smashed their own growth targets and every monthly dashboard report has been as green as green can be, or has been smattered with broad smiley faces….until now!

Lately, hitting growth targets in this company has been a little harder.

Some staff have started going off sick regularly and there is at least one case of a leading salesperson being off long term with a mental health issue. Despite every effort, energy and productivity levels are flagging and it has become more difficult to find good quality new recruits. To top it off, one or two of their best salespeople have moved on to other companies.

It doesn’t sound that dramatic does it, but it is enough for companies to lose their cutting edge and in business, maintaining an edge over competitors, is everything!

So what else should we be measuring? Well market leading companies are increasingly also measuring;

1. Workforce Health and Wellbeing – Including aspects of lifestyle and health, mental health, stress, wellbeing and happiness.
2. Workplace Culture – Looking at values, approaches to learning, risk, staff motivation, workforce diversity and process design?
3. Workspace – Examining whether physical workspaces are supporting business needs and the happiness and wellbeing of employees? Are they attracting, or deterring the best staff?
4. Retention and Recruitment – Not just measuring ins and outs, but also, why aren’t the best people joining and why are good people leaving?

The workplace is changing, and the market leaders of the future will be the ones that continue to give great customer experience. To do this, they know their employees need to receive a great employee experience, to give a great customer experience and to do that companies need to pay attention to much more than sales, costs and profit.