Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 7 – Be Prepared from the Start
Business performance assessments aggregate huge amounts of data in order to provide a very few high value insights. (See Figure 1: Data Refinement and Consolidation Model below) As an assessment progresses, evaluators often feel increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of data they must sift through, organize, and analyze. Time seems to slip away and pressure to find the key insights mounts; making the objective appear to be that of finding a needle in a haystack with only a moment’s notice. To be successful requires thoughtful, deliberate preparation.[wcm_restrict plans=”47754, 25542, 25653″]
How to Prepare for a Business Performance Assessment
Business performance assessment teams typically source their data from documents, interviews, and observations. While interviews and observations are usually conducted during performance of the assessment, documents can be gathered in advance. Interview and observations should be scheduled prior to the assessment’s start as a part of the project plan’s development. Lastly, data collection, preliminary analysis, and final report forms should be made readily available to all team members before the assessment begins.
An assessment, being a project, should have a plan that is also produced prior to work start. These plans should include items such as interviews, observations, stakeholder communication meetings including periodic and final report-out briefings, team meetings, analysis time, and assessment document development time. Calendar appointments should also be scheduled with all involved participants to ensure availability of key resources when needed.
Security clearance is often a prerequisite to gaining access to documents to be reviewed, personnel to be interviewed, and activities to be observed. In these cases, security access refers to document libraries, computer applications and networks, and building access. Clearance filing and processing should occur before the assessment kick-off.
Assessment teams are just that – teams. They must be supported by communications and collaboration tools in order to work together effectively. Tools such as contact lists, emailing lists, team erooms/websites, and a roles and responsibilities matrix all help foster teamwork from day one when prepared in advance of the assessment. Additionally, the assessment leader should consider writing a welcome letter introducing team members to these tools, the assessment schedule, stakeholder and team member biographies, a document list with access directions, and a list of key facility features and locations.
Final Thought…
Remember that it is your responsibility to ensure both internal and external assessment team members are properly prepared to conduct the assessment. Proper prior preparation will reduce team stress, improve efficiency, and enhance overall performance; providing the organization with richer insights and making you all the more successful.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”47754, 25542, 25653″]
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Leadership Inspirations – Find a Way
“When faced with a challenge, look for a way, not a way out.”
David Weatherford
Thank God For a Good Recession: 7 No Fail Strategies to Pull Ahead During Tough Times
Fortunes are made during recessions – it’s the perfect time to pull ahead of competitors. Challenging times require that we raise the bar on expectations and that we celebrate the accomplishment of those expectations. Here are seven you need to implement NOW.
1) Be a Giver…NOT a Taker
Your relationship with current customers, prospective customers, and centers of influence should be based on giving. They should hear from you every 90 days – lest they forget you and acquaint themselves with your competition. Send informational mailings like a “Top 10 Tips for Preparing for the School Season” sheet. Including coupons from one of your retail customers are great ways to add value to the correspondence. A “taker” approach – sending “buy me,” four-color, glossy brochures – will create almost no response. Givers always get better results than takers.
[wcm_restrict]2) Clarify Measurable Expectations
A Business Week survey asked individuals, “Are you one of the Top 10% of performers in your company?”
The percentage answering “yes”:
- Middle managers: 84%
- Females: 89%
- Males: 91%
- Age 55+: 93%
- Work for company with less than 50 employees: 96%
- Executives: 97%
Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking – and all the children are above average! Seems like a delusional view of our contribution is the norm.
This begs the question: How do you help people understand what quantifiable measurements they should be scoring themselves on so they can assess their contributions intelligently?
The need for “critical driver” numbers and quantifiable results for each position is imperative. A sales associate who knows his or her critical performance drivers and how they will be measured each week is newly empowered to assess his or her true contribution.
Every team member should have exact measurements in place to help them understand how they rank in relation to your expectations using approximately five “critical driver” areas. It will help your people ground themselves in reality and create “real” plans for progress toward precise goals.
3) Execute, Execute, Execute
It’s no surprise that the team with the most passion to get things done wins. It’s time-tested. And those that throw their hearts over the bar manage to catapult over the heads of their competitors.
CEO Advisor LLC proves that execution is the key to success, sharing that “The execution ability of a team remains the single most important skill we see. Recently, 500 CEOs were asked to name their company’s greatest competitive advantage. A majority 88% said it was that they executed better than their competitors.”
If execution is so important, then what holds people back from doing it? A recent Harris Interactive survey discovered the following barriers that must be addressed by leaders and their teams:
The big picture is out of focus. Only 22% of workers are focused on organizational goals and only 23% precisely understand their organization’s strategy and goals.
Goals are unclear. Only 10% of workers have clear, measurable, deadline-driven work goals.
No individual or group prioritization. Only 8% of workers systematically schedule their priorities. Only 60% of an individual worker’s time is spent actually working on key goals. And only 14% of the average work groups’ time focuses on top goals!
The bottom line? Great execution requires alignment, accountability and action. Execution isn’t a pipe dream, but it does require investing the time and effort to create a playbook for the game, to study that playbook and of course, to get on the field and play. By providing your employees with more context and fostering more alignment, you’ll actually empower the kind of understanding, accountability and excitement that make winning the execution game a lot more simple and easy.
4) Run A Tight Ship
Someone’s late for a meeting. Nobody calls the person on it. Next week, three people are late. That’s no coincidence. Eventually, there won’t be a meeting in the entire organization that starts within 15 minutes of the scheduled time.
You have checklists required to make sure people are in compliance. Somebody skips it saying, “Gosh, I was busy, so I didn’t do it.” Suddenly nobody is doing checklists and your organization resembles the “friendly zoo.”
What’s wrong? When everybody knows the rules, but you don’t hold each other accountable, organizations naturally become rule-free and loose.
If you look at every successful organization, you’ll see groups in which team members respectfully call out other team members whenever service standards are compromised, deadlines are missed, or an honor code is violated.
Struggling organizations have folks who just want to be “nice.” They let it all go – which means, of course, that others will let THEM go when they mess up. Now the whole group is letting it all go – and in no time flat, you’re back to blaming the economy.
It is not management’s job alone to call people on their “stuff” – it is the role of every person within the organization. Only by doing so can you have any hope of progression. Repeating yesterday will NOT create different results. Management’s job is to make sure every person is offering constructive feedback and pushing each other to greatness.
5) Love Your Top 100 List – and Let Them Know It
While 80 percent of profits come from the top 20 percent of customers, why wouldn’t you create a rock-solid “contact every month” plan for your top 100 prospective and current customers? Not only will those customers appreciate your constant information sharing, small gifts, and special invitations, they will buy more from you, “sneeze” about you to others, and become evangelists with their friends. What better way to bring in more profitable accounts than to recruit your profitable accounts to be on your “sales team?”
6) Teach Your Employees the Discipline of Winning Behaviors
Do your employees have the disciplines and skills to compete against your toughest competitors? From knowing how to flip a customer from a conversation of price to one of value – your Unique Selling Proposition – and how to cross sell other products discretely and effectively. Winners of the Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award benchmarked that for every dollar invested in training their people, they received a 30-1 return. When one manager remarked that he didn’t train his people because they might leave, he didn’t think of the worse nightmare – what if they aren’t trained…and they stay? Now, that’s a scary thought.
7) Love Your Customers and Show It
Now more than ever, it’s vital to retain your customers and to find new ways to meet their needs.
And the number one way to do this is to show them in tangible and intangible ways that you really care about them. A great way to do this is to organize and launch a “We Love Our Customers” program – it’s fun, it’s easy and it’s also a fantastic way to connect on an emotional level with people.
Research proves that customer loyalty can only be created when an emotional connection is established.
So make loving customers everyone’s job!
Get your team together to brainstorm new ways to show you care. Here’s just a few ideas to get you started:
- Have at least three people say, “See you tomorrow.” Or “Thanks for coming today” as each customer leaves making them feel welcome
- High five customers when they have a breakthrough like making a buying decision or come to a revelation – customers are people too. They want fun.
- Send notes to clients and call them often.
- Set standards for all customer service touch points and make sure to measure and celebrate results
- Have a few standards that are outrageously better than expected.
Have fun, collaborate, and use your imagination. Love your customers and your community and they will love you back!
And a One More Bonus…Understand the Game Is about Winning Hearts
…those of your employees and your customers. People buy for emotional reasons, and you must start first by winning over the hearts of your employees. Once your employees believe you are the best and the ONLY choice for your current and prospective customers, they will quickly win over your customers hearts.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]
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About the Author
Roxanne Emmerich’s Thank God It’s Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love
Management Observation Program Best Practice 6 – Observation Announcement Timing
Philosophically speaking, no one, including managers, should ever be afraid to have ‘the boss’ know or observe what he or she is doing. Being human, we naturally feel self imposed pressure to perform well especially when we are being watched. Subsequently, management observations will always make the conscientious employee at least somewhat nervous. When then does a manager announce that he or she will be observing an individual’s performance? In most cases, shortly before the observation begins.[wcm_restrict plans=”41922, 25542, 25653″]
Why not announce the intent to perform the observation well in advance?
Management observation programs seek to identify the actual performance practices of the workforce. Announcing the observation well in advance of its performance allows those being observed to study and practice for the observation, often artificially changing what would have otherwise been the employee’s performance. While in some cases this results in artificially (and only momentarily) improved performance, at other times performance significantly declines as employees wrongly guess at what the manager wants to see and deviate from established practices. Additionally, some employees will unduly dwell on the fact that they are going to be observed; assuming the reason for the observation is prior poor performance and elevating their workplace stress after at the detriment of productivity and performance quality.
When should the intent to perform a management observation be announced?
Management observations should be announced shortly before commencement of the activity to be observed (see Defining ‘Shortly Before’ below). This allows the individual to be observed the opportunity to recover from the very natural surprise from the announcement without giving them an extended opportunity to become anxious or nervously dwell on the situation. Additionally, the observed won’t have time to prepare themselves into a different performance state; providing the manager with first hand insight into actual workforce performance.
Defining ‘Shortly Before’
Depending on the activity to be observed, announcing the observation ‘shortly before’ will reference different timeframes. The following general principles should be considered to determine when to announce a management observation:
- prior to the beginning of work; no mid-activity surprises
- typically no earlier than the beginning of the day or shift the observation is to be performed
- 30-60 minutes before the typical activity preparation reviews, material gathering, tool selection, site preparation, etcetera begins while still adhering to Principle 2
- at the beginning of the observation. This is a second announcement to remind the employee that he or she is now being observed
Note: Complex activities for which preparation occurs days or shifts in advance should have their observations announced at the beginning of the day, shift, or 30-60 minutes before the start of the activity whichever comes later.
Note: the manager should consider observing the preparation activities too as these will yield additional invaluable insight into employee performance
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Leadership Inspirations – Destiny is a Matter of Choice
“Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”
William Jennings Bryan
‘The Great Commoner’
41st United States Secretary of State