Most of the time the leaders know, the managers know, but the next level down doesn’t know. So you’re dashboard, I don’t care what you use, has to be clean, simple, and it has to tell us what’s most important right now. It has to tell us what’s happening today and maybe the next five days.
Now it’s not like we talked about forecasting and trending, that’s a little further out a little further in time. But dashboards are about today, tomorrow, this week. It helps us make immediate changes and quick action.
Again, when you’re looking at a baseball game, football game, whatever it is, you can see the stats. How many hits, how many kicks, who’s winning, who’s losing. That’s what you want your dashboard to be.
A lot of us have guys in the field so there’s guys all over the place, and they may not see that information soon enough. Your dashboard should be simple enough that you can text it to them on a consistent basis. Maybe every Monday you’re telling them where we need to get to, and every Friday you let them know where we finished off.
Plus you can incorporate email, or you could even do a video weekly. We do an email called “A Monday on the Monday.” It is all the updated information that we give out to the employees. We also do a “Wednesday on the Wednesday.” On Wednesdays, we’re giving safety tips and information, and yes we do one on Friday. It’s about communication and serving the customer.
Now here’s the thing. My culture can handle multiple emails. They’re used to taking it fast and furious. They’re used to taking action. But don’t culture shock your business and go there and start sending 100 emails a day because your employees do have a job to do. But you might start out with just one. One day during the week, give it a cool name, and make sure it has high value. Don’t turn your emails and your dashboards into meetings. Meetings are meant to make decisions, they’re not gatherings.
Your challenge today is to look at you dashboard, ask some questions and survey your employees, and ask “is this delivering the information we need to win the game?” If you don’t have a dashboard ask yourself, “what should the dashboard be?”
Mike Agugliaro, Business Ninja
