The Ultimate Guide to Metrics for Business Leaders Drive performance by focusing on key measurements in seven telling ways.
By Asha Saxena Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
By letting data be your North Star, you'll establish a strong connection between every aspect of your business and the relevant metrics, driving your team to progress and problem solve more effectively and helping the company reach its full potential.
But to capture the metrics that will help your specific business, you need the right tools and methods. Here are seven tips for helping your team become metrics savvy:
Related: 5 Must-Track Metrics to Keep Your Startup Alive
1. Measure everything.
You should measure the financial health of your company and fiscal targets should be in your employees' daily purview, but view your business through other metrical lenses as well.
To make metrics work for your business, track and analyze proximity to your sales and marketing goals as well as monitor the health of your team culture, employee satisfaction and trends developing in the market.
2. Self-evaluate.
Some of the most enlightening metrics come from your evaluation of your own performance and job satisfaction. It can be difficult to judge yourself objectively but deep down you probably know how your weaknesses percolate into your work. And as a leader, your honest self-assessment can encourage your employees to do the same.
3. Invest.
Having a thorough, company-wide approach to metrics costs money but view it as a wise investment. Invest in people, technology and processes, the three key pillars to metrics success. Give your employees the tools and the time to engage with metrics, by distributing surveys, creating visible dashboards and holding dedicated metrics meetings.
Related: 4 Reasons Sharing Performance Metrics Will Accelerate Your Business
4. Make metrics visible.
The best way to connect every member of your team to the company's metrics in a meaningful, regular way is to make them visible. At my company, each department has an analytics dashboard and scorecard, which display high-level goals and how the organization is performing on the specific tasks that comprise them. Making metrics visible encourages transparency and can dramatically increase motivation.
5. Hold touch-point meetings.
Metrics are useless if they don't lead to company adjustments and growth. My organization hosts weekly touch-point meetings where the discussion is driven by a focus on company metrics. These meetings help employees develop the habit of responding regularly and directly to the company's metrics and using that information while it's still relevant.
6. Use surveys.
Acquiring metrics on your company's culture doesn't have to involve a complex investigation. Distributing thoughtfully written surveys to your employees (or clients, for that matter) can give clues about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of your team that you can use to develop improvements.
7. Connect the whole team.
You can't keep the metrics to yourself or share them only with other leaders in your team. The optimal way for metrics to help a business is by providing every team member with feedback about the company's performance. This way, everyone will feel accountable for the business, more motivated to stay involved and better able to make intelligent decisions.
By letting members of your whole team connect with metrics and invest quality time into digesting the findings together, you can turn those little numbers into progress. It's all about establishing a rhythm of communicating about how your company is doing and how that relates to operations. This is important not only for your employees but also for you as a leader.
Related: 5 Steps to Building an Ambitious, Yet Credible Sales Forecast
