by Patrick Thean and the Rhythm Team
Written by Cindy Praeger and Eskinder Assefa
A fairly significant body of research now clearly shows that the reason why a number of mid-to-large companies face is not that their strategies were not sound, but because they were unable to create a culture of strategy execution to perform well on those otherwise sound strategies. Successful teams bridge the strategy to execution gap through Intelligent Work.
Businesses looking to implement goal setting best practices are often drowning in a sea of acronyms that can be hard to navigate. What’s better - MBOs or OKRs? Where do KPIs fit in? Should I have SMART goals or stretch goals or something else? There are lots of tools and frameworks and different acronyms out there, but there are some key elements of effective goal-setting that underlie all of the most effective business goals.
First, let’s clarify the terminology a little bit. I’ll give a brief explanation of what MBOs, OKRs, and KPIs are and what the pros and cons may be for each.
Your company is growing fast and managing projects and tracking metrics across teams is complex and difficult. You now have multiple systems in different teams adding to the complexity and difficulty. The result of this complexity and difficulty is being blindsided by missed goals. You don't want to be blindsided anymore. It stresses everyone out. Opportunities vanish and aren't realized. This costs you and your company millions of dollars. It may cost you and your executive team your jobs.
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.
As the middle market strategy execution experts, we get asked a lot of questions about KPIs or Key Performance Indicators for firms to manage the metrics that matter. In fact, we get hundreds of thousands of yearly views on our KPI blog posts alone! Our comprehensive KPI Guide is one of the most valuable free resources that we offer to the middle market community free of charge to help companies determine the right set of KPIs for their business if they don’t have the resources to utilize our expertise and KPI dashboard software to create a balanced scorecard (BSC) of their performance.
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 my favorite manufacturing KPIs and metrics:
Research shows that our economy is largely being driven by middle-market firms, especially those in the service industries. Key Performance Indicators (KPIS) are one of the most effective tools for service companies to manage their growth, cash flow, customer retention and customer satisfaction. According to a press release from American Express:
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!
If you want to set compelling and achievable goals for yourself, your teams and your company, drop everything and invent a time machine. OK—not literally, but metaphorical time travel is a key component of effective goal setting.
Why time travel? To paint a picture of success. Why is this important? Why do you need to know what success looks like?
In their classic book Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath describe the importance of what they call “pointing to the destination” with a destination postcard. They argue you need “a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible” to rally the troops behind your goal. Visualizing success in detail is motivating to the team and actually helps you achieve it.
We are thrilled to host our 5th Annual Breakthrough Conference once again in Charlotte, NC, this October 24th and 25th, at the Charlotte Marriott City Center. Charlotte is Rhythm Systems' home base, and we want you to enjoy it as much as we do. Here are some recommendations to enhance your stay once the conference is wrapped!
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