Rhythm Blog | KPIs & Dashboards

Many people wonder and worry about whether or not they are doing a good job and if their boss is happy with their work. It is one of the consistent emotional challenges employees face in the workplace, and sadly, most people don't know what to do about it.

One way this challenge has been dealt with is by having the dreaded annual or quarterly performance review. That's the day when you go and find the document (if you had one) from your last review and hope that you were able to improve your work performance from last time you had a formal discussion with your boss. This is usually a lose-lose scenario. You dread these meetings because they feel so formal and awkward. Your boss dreads these meetings because they have to try to figure out something smart, insightful and helpful to say to you to make them look and feel like they are being a good boss. Once it's over, all breathe a sigh of relief and are glad they don't have to do that again for another 3 months—or even a year.

Because Rhythm strategy execution software acts as a framework for pulling together into one single system many improvement initiatives and management tools that are popular among manufacturing companies, many of our most successful clients come from the manufacturing industry. One area that our clients come to us for help with is determining the right manufacturing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for their manufacturing metrics dashboard to drive performance.  Some production managers are not sure where to start, and many are measuring so many things that their manufacturing metrics are just noise, not driving action or change to drive your operating efficiency and product planning KPIs and KRA (key results areas.)

Manufacturing KPI Examples

It is important to grow the top line of your business on an annual basis, but you also need to make sure the bottom line is healthy which can help fund that growth. This is particularly important if you are a manufacturing company and need to be efficient in your production process. In most cases, the two biggest expenses in your manufacturing business are labor and raw materials. There are exceptions, of course, in machine intensive automated manufacturing plants, but let’s focus on the former. So how can we make sure the production line is running at peak performance? One very effective way is to put the right balance of production KPIs in place. Some of these are leading indicator KPIs that help provide insight into future performance and some are results KPIs that tell you how you have done. It is good to have both, although I always prefer giving my production managers a good set of leading indicator KPIs as these manufacturing metrics drive the results.

Here are some of the most effective manufacturing KPIs and metrics:

According to a recent article I read in Harvard Business Review, "most employees want to be productive, but the organization too often gets in their way. Our research indicates that the average company loses more than 20% of its productive capacity — more than a day each week — to what we call 'organizational drag,' the structures and processes that consume valuable time and prevent people from getting things done."  What productivity KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics can we measure employee performance, employee satisfaction and employee engagement?

The article continued to say that "people have huge amounts of discretionary energy that they could devote to their work, but many are not sufficiently inspired to do so. Virtually every employee can bring more to their job, but many don’t invest the additional ingenuity and creativity that they could to improve productivity. Inspired employees bring more discretionary energy to their work every day. As a result, they are 125% more productive than an employee who is merely satisfied. Stated differently, one inspired employee can produce as much as 2.25 satisfied employees."

Wow! I was stunned by this data!  

We all know we need to be prepared for the worst—while striving for the best—when it comes to the effects of COVID-19, and the market has proven that leaders who remain calm and focused are better able to steer their team through turbulence and uncertainty. However, my experience is that many leaders and leadership teams do not know how to do this.

I'm being asked by CEOs worldwide, "What few things must I focus on now?" Even when leadership appears calm like a duck on the surface, many leaders today are paddling like mad underwater with only a finite few that have clear direction.

Many planning tools are used on an annual basis—yet, they are often overlooked in the middle of a pandemic like COVID-19. There is an opportunity, now more than ever, in your team's need for direction, a way to focus their action and a bumper rail to keep them moving forward. This will allow you to harness the energy of your team rather than sinking in the quicksand of panic.

Many executives have heard of SWOT but aren’t familiar with how to leverage it for their business plan, much less how to utilize it in a time of crisis. Every business I work with has seen affects from the pandemic—either positive or negative. Let’s look at how to utilize the SWOT approach for either effect by making it a cSWOT (Crisis SWOT). A cSWOT is key to establishing a healthy decision-making capability and communication rhythm in your company during trying times.

The Balanced Scorecard, originally developed by Dr. Robert Kaplan of Harvard University and Dr. David Norton, can keep your company balanced. They used this scorecard as a framework for measuring organizational performance through a balanced set of performance measures (as opposed to Wall Street’s need for short-term financial performance). Kaplan and Norton’s approach added non-financial measures to the standard financial measure of the time to more accurately focus on a company’s long-term success.

Here’s how they described the innovation of the Balanced Scorecard in chapter one of their book, page 7:

Managing a remote team is challenging, even in the best of times. In our current environment, it is really tough to keep the team engaged, focused and contributing to the company’s ability to survive and thrive.

Frequent check-ins are critical. Having 1:1 meetings with your team members, team huddles, and weekly meetings will help keep you on track. You need talk time with your team, and they need to hear from you often. This generates a lot of meetings, and for a team leader who is talking to a lot of different people all day long, it can be hard to keep track of the information you are gleaning from various team members.

Have you ever wondered just what is going on in your business, how well things are going, and why? How can you know for sure that your people and teams are focused and aligned to achieve your long-term growth strategies and goals? How can you ensure you are doing the right things to attract the best talent and keep them happy in your company so they won’t leave you? These are all questions that an Enterprise Work Execution Platform can help you answer.

It is no secret that your people are instrumental to the success of your business. In order to have a great company, you not only have to hire the right people and get them in the right seats as Jim Collins says, you also have to work to retain and engage those people once you have them.  The best companies use key performance indicators for employees to make sure that they are getting the most out of their most important investment - their employees.  Having the right set of quality metrics can greatly improve your performance management in creating a high-performing team.