 |
Archive for the ‘bottom line performance’ Category
Monday, April 18th, 2011
Many people think that keeping a scorecard is tedious, even unnecessary. By keeping a scorecard it can help individuals and teams discover ways to change or improve processes to increase a task’s effectiveness.
 For example, in a scorecard that I use at CMOE, Invoice to Payment, we measure the number of days between when an invoice is sent to a client and the day we received payment. Most of our clients pay within thirty to forty days. However, by monitoring the scorecard daily, I noticed that some of our clients were taking to up five months before they paid the invoice. This made the performance line fall above the target goal of 35 days on our scorecard. My question was why?
What was happening?
A couple of things came to the surface when I talked with a specific handful of companies about why it was taking so long for us to receive their payments. The first response usually was that the Accounts Payable team was not getting the invoice. Were the invoices lost in the mail, or buried on someone’s desk? We began e-mailing all invoices and past-due notices directly to the person who placed the order in addition to Accounts Payable. For some reason, people respond more quickly to e-mails. Almost immediately, I started to get e-mails instructing me on how these companies preferred to have invoices submitted. Getting the invoices to the right parties made a big difference in the time between invoicing and receiving payment. International invoicing was entirely another problem. Through trial and error, we found that by simply adding bank information as a mandatory item to every international invoice, the clients were able to get payments to us in a much more efficient manner.
The End Result
Overall, the average payment score went from 58 days to 28 days in a matter of eight months– that’s Thirty days of improvement! You may ask, “Why didn’t the AR Aging report say the same thing as a score card?”
Why a Scorecard?
I worked with a biweekly report for three years in order to decrease the number of outstanding invoices. In 2010 the average still seemed high. The score card diverted my attention from the number of outstanding invoices to the number of days between invoice took to be paid. The visual reminder of a scorecard also motivated me to think about this issue on a daily basis and prompted other team members to get involved. I don’t know if thirty days will make a big difference to your company, but to our Regional Vice Presidents 30 days was huge. Improved cash flow and the use of measurements allowed them to make more accurate strategic plans for the company.
Tags: balanced scorecard concept, business scorecard example, scorecards for business, scorekeeping, scorekeeping in business
Posted in Increase Profits, bottom line performance, bottom line results, score keeping, scorecard, scorekeeping | No Comments »
Monday, March 28th, 2011
 Rumor has it that smaller staffs, with people wearing more “hats,” is the new normal since the economic downtrend. Perhaps this is not very far from the truth. You no longer see bank foyers dotted with desks; instead they have installed “pods” that you step up to, rather than sit down to perform your financial transactions. Self-checkout lanes have become commonplace, and the days of (real life) grocery tellers asking you how your day is going as they scan your groceries and send them down the conveyer belt seem to be numbered. Doing less with more, combining two or three jobs into one, buying into the latest software or electronic gadgets to help the workplace become more efficient, or simply getting more from the fewer employees you have is where the business world is headed.
In a downturn, people look to improve upon roles and responsibilities that they already have. “The economic pressures of the downturn forced companies to re-examine everything they were doing and come up with a new model,” said Harry Griendling, CEO of DoubleStar, a human resources consulting firm. No matter how you say it, the underlying idea is asking for more, but offering less.
This is a good concept in and of itself. But do all of us really need to go down this road? Rumor also has it that the economy is in an upturn. Most economists predict U.S. employers will add about 2.4 million jobs this year. But the Economy is not set to fully recover until around 2014. In the meantime, how does one make sure the many hat wearing workers continue to increase the profit and productivity of their employees in today’s economy? How do those who hold jobs, keep their jobs and increase their value to add tenure in an organization? Instead of buying into the latest gadget, you go back to the basics, like your people and your bottom line.
John Villere said, “Your bottom line starts with your front line.” Sounds like a good place to start to me. CMOE’s Bottom Line Leadership specifically targets front-line leaders, mid-level managers, and senior executives to help organizations build these skills and increase the energy they’ll need to accelerate performance improvement throughout the organization. Once your people in your organization know how what they contribute, effects the bottom line, you will know how to improve your contribution and in essence, wear another hat. Bottom Line Leadersip teaches businesses how to use the resources that they currently have at their disposal in a smarter way.
So get back to the basics: metrics, knowledge base, performance. You will find that the practical application of the most basic processes will gain you the fastest results.
Tags: employee roles, increase bottom line, increase your profits, increasing bottom line
Posted in bottom line performance, bottom line results, performance, productivity | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 7th, 2011
 Organizations continually try to measure performance and bottom line results. It is common to hear someone make the comment, “We can run a report for that,” or “We can pull that data and take a look at those number.” While data can be helpful in making calculated decision and generating volumes of helpful statistical information, the reality is that those terabytes of data stored electronically do not equate to measurement. Data is data. Data is not measurement.
Data however can be useful in helping to identify and create measurements by taking a look at the past so to better understand where to go in the future. Bottom line measurement is about looking at our effectiveness in real time. How are we doing today (measurement) as compared to yesterday (data), the past week (data), or past month (data). They key is to identify a measurement of effectiveness that adds value and contributes to the overall bottom line performance of the organization. Measurement is about keeping track of the things that are helping us win at work.
Caveat:
People tend to associate measurement as a negative process; measurement of defects, number of safety violations, etc. However, effective measurement helps us grow and become more effective. As results based leaders, it is critical to make measurement positive. If measurement is negative, it becomes one of the quickest paths to demotivating your people. Measurement needs to encourage more of the same positive, results based behaviors.
Tags: bottom line performance, bottom line results, employee performance
Posted in bottom line leadership, bottom line performance, bottom line results, results based leadership, score keeping, scorekeeping | No Comments »
Monday, February 28th, 2011
Outside of work, people are highly motivated to stretch their mental and physical limits. They complete triathalons in record time, ride dog sleds across frozen tundra, and climb mountain peaks few have mastered. In 1950, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal became the first people to successfully climb Annapurna, an 8,000-meter peak found high in the Himalayas. The toll the mountain took on these men was brutal: each man lost a number of fingers and toes during their climb to the summit, and they were lucky to have not lost their lives. Even today, over 40% of the people who attempt to climb Annapurna die on their way to the summit. So why make the attempt? What draws people to spend their own time and money—and risk their personal safety—to reach this kind of target? The challenge. The mountain stood before them, the summit forbidding and nearly unreachable, and they wanted to see if they had it in them to make it to the top.
 In order to see the benefits of this same level of dedication at work, leaders and managers need to help their employees find a workplace version of Annapurna. Leaders need to provide their employees with opportunities to be challenged, situations that require them to reach well beyond what is expected of them and truly excel. People love to achieve difficult goals, and they love to up the ante. Once they have reached one summit, they will be ready to move on to the next. Achieving easy goals is boring, no matter what the environment. And inside the workplace, requiring employees to reach higher levels of performance makes the work they do more rewarding, resulting in greater job satisfaction, deeper dedication to the organization, and a heftier, healthier bottom line results. So give your employees the chance to sink their teeth into bigger, better challenges. Search for that next summit, find that next challenge, reward your people for striving to reach the top. They can make it, and you’ll find the proof in your bottom line.
Tags: employee goals, employee objectives, motivating employees, motivation to increase performance, performance goals
Posted in bottom line leadership, bottom line performance, bottom line results, goals & goal setting, leadership, productivity | No Comments »
Thursday, February 17th, 2011
Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson’s Psychoanalytical Theories help explain positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. They believed that when a stimulus is introduced and a particular behavior is reinforced (such as a teacher giving praise for a right answer), we are more likely to see that behavior repeated. This is the root of the idea of Positive Reinforcement.
 In a recent conversation with a colleague we discussed the ideas of the Psychoanalytical theory and whether it is relevant in today’s society, specifically with regard to the ideas of positive reinforcement. As I thought a little more deeply about this concept, I realized that these ideas are clearly applicable and prevalent in the workplace today.
Do you see the effects of positive reinforcement in your organization? Are your employees being recognized for their hard work? Or are they starving for a little appreciation? If the theory of Positive Reinforcement is applicable in the workplace, and we recognize our employees for their hard work, employees will become more motivated and easier to coach, and will help the business grow over the long term. By taking the time to recognize the effort your employees put forth, they will naturally become more dedicated and will want to achieve your organization’s goals. With the right goals, scorecards, and metrics, you truly can make a difference to your bottom line performance.
So what are some ways that you can acknowledge your employees? I have witnessed a number of ways in which you can recognize employees in order to motivate them and make them more coachable. Here is a list of five very quick, very simple ways to show your employees that you notice and appreciate what they do for you:
1. Simply say “thank you”
2. Take the time, even if it’s in passing, to learn of their successes
3. Reward effort as well as success
4. Publicly announce their success
5. Offer the right incentives to succeed
There are many other ways to show appreciation to and acknowledge your employees for their hard work, efforts, and success. Just remember that by recognizing their labor, you can help your business grow and ultimately achieve the result you want and a boost to your bottom line.
Tags: employee appreciation, employee motivation, motivating employees, positive reinforcement, Psychoanalytical Theories
Posted in bottom line leadership, bottom line performance, bottom line results, performance, praise, productivity, recognition, scorecard | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011
The vast majority of important challenges and difficult problems that organizations have to solve in order to achieve increased workplace productivity are not overcome with more technology, huge investments in equipment, or savvy business strategies. What really makes a difference is the efforts of the people who work far away from the limelight. In essence, the key to achieving better business results and increased productivity is having competent, well-intended, and well-instructed people work closely with a coach who can guide them through the maze of expectations, competencies, and requirements needed to elevate their performance and drive value for the business and its customers. Improving the bottom line and business productivity requires courageous coaches and leaders who will give their people honest feedback on each individual’s measures of effectiveness.
In order to accomplish these goals, leaders need to have the ability to define simple, meaningful productivity measures for each associate or worker, create visual or graphic individual scorecards, and regularly facilitate powerful conversations about the results the scorecards show.
 The individual productivity scorecard immediately begins to speak to the performer. This productivity scorecard will help highlight the reasons for noticeable improvements in productivity as well as the root causes of any productivity shortfalls. The scorecard becomes the source of motivation. It can challenge people to do more, be more creative, achieve their potential, and become more committed to the organization. With the help of a productivity scorecard and a coach who is willing to discuss and explore productivity-enhancing ideas, people will get excited and engaged about the challenge of improving productivity. It is all about measuring performance and coaching people around what matters most.
What will drive a better bottom line for the business and create value for your customers as well? CMOE team members are willing to talk with you and offer a free one-hour consultation on how our-productivity improvement process works, how we can combine effective leadership, coaching, feedback, problem-solving, and goal-setting skills to drive eye-popping improvements in the productivity of your business.
Tags: how to measure employee processes, measuring perfomance, measuring worker productivity, performance measure
Posted in bottom line performance, measurement, performance | No Comments »
Monday, January 31st, 2011
 “I hope business is slow today” is a constant theme that is present in many organizations. This theme is about individuals, employee, and managers who do not understand or fully realize the importance and value they provide the organization and work they do. These are the people that come into work today, do their job, and collect a pay check. These are the people that truly hope business is slow today through a misunderstood notation that being slow benefits them. Yet the irony of the situation is if business were slow every day, it is likely the organization who provides their paycheck would cease to exist.
If you pay attention to the world of work, you will observe that this them is quite prevalent. It is likely it exists among employees in your own organization (if you haven’t seen it already). It is likely present with your clients, the vendors who serve you, and even at your favorite lunch spot. You don’t have to look hard or far to find those people who truly hope that business is slow today.
Generally speaking, these people aren’t bad people, free loaders, or poor hires. The fact is many of them fail to see or have not been given the full picture of how they help the organization and why they matter. Leaders and managers must be on the look-out for people who hope business is slow, and make an effort to help motivate these individuals and help them understand how important they are to the organization. Couple this with frequent coaching (formal and informal) and a creating a culture of feedback, and you’ll soon find your employee are engage to have a productive day at work with a focus on the bottom line.
Tags: Coaching, corporate coaching, Employee Coaching, motivating employees, motivation, motivation in the workplace, motivation to increase performance
Posted in accountability, bottom line performance, bottom line results, motivation | No Comments »
Monday, January 10th, 2011
 Many organizations track metrics in order to improve efficiency or processes. The question is, are the metrics true motivators, or are they merely numbers, charts, or graphs posted on a wall?
As we walk the halls of the companies with which we work, we often see the “metrics wall”. This wall is usually in a high-traffic area. Many employees walk by the “metrics wall” on a regular basis, but how many employees actually stop to look at it? Our observation has been that not many bother to take the time.
Why is that? For many employees, the “metrics wall” is just another wall. More often than not, those employees who walk by without stopping have no idea what it is that the metrics are tracking. They don’t know how to read the charts and graphs; they don’t understand what the numbers indicate. Those few who do understand what the charts, graphs, and numbers mean often don’t feel like the information has any real correlation to the impact that they have on the organization.
Making Them More Effective
How can we make the “metrics wall” more effective and motivating? A good place to start is making sure each employee understands what it is that they contribute to the organization. Each employee must recognize what they are paid to accomplish. Once employees understand how they contribute to the organization’s bottom line, understanding how metrics reflect their accomplishment becomes much easier.
Another idea is to create individual scorecards or metrics that reflect each employee’s unique jobs and responsibilities. Making the scorecards personal and specific increases accountability and responsibility for results. Once Employees create their scorecards, they can place the scorecards on their cubicle walls or office doors, giving leaders a way to quickly see how the employee is doing and an opportunity to give the employee feedback on his/her work.
Is Is About Employee Engagement
Metrics, when done the right way, can be very motivating to employees. The key is to ensure that employees understand what the numbers indicate and why the specific action is being tracked. Using metrics or scorecards in combination with effective and frequent coaching, feedback, and goal-setting can result in rapid improvements to overall productivity and profitability, meaning that your business will become and remain more competitive over the long term.
Tags: business metrics, increase productivity, increase profitability, increse productivity, key business metrics, ways to increase profitability
Posted in Increase Profits, bottom line leadership, bottom line performance, bottom line results, metrics, score keeping, scorecard, scorekeeping | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 27th, 2010
The support functions in your operations are critical to the success of business yet it is often tougher to measure their contribution than those in production or sales. Too often we look at support functions, from HR to project management, as a cost center only incidentally connected to our focus on increased profit margins and improved efficiency. We treat them as necessary functions which we justify from the neck up, but starve budgetarily because it’s hard to draw a straight line from what they do to the P&L statement.
Just yesterday we received this e-mail from a frustrated senior executive:
“(The president of our company) has been on an absolute rampage about expenses lately & specifically complained last week that “education” on our P&L is up considerably this year. Coaching & counseling is largely seen as a negative. I’d like to turn it somehow to a positive.”
 Making The Business Case For The Resources You Need
The ability to measure the contribution of support functions is essential for many reasons. High on the list is the ability to know when to celebrate the best efforts and direct resources to these critical components that ultimately grow the people and improve the processes that drive our operation. Making the business case to justify resources or additional resources can be more difficult if the outcomes of your effort are distant. This can be the case if you’re responsible for long project cycles, when the outcomes are changes in human behavior or skill development, or in the case of health care, for instance, we are talking about the emotional and qualitative well-being of a patient.
Balance Scorecards – Only The Beginning
The Balanced Scorecard methodology initially attempted to capture metrics to measure the effectiveness of those that support the operations. The original four sections were a first attempt at broadening traditional financial metrics by adding Customer, Learning and Growth, and Internal Business Process as categories. The second wave of Balanced Scorecard methodology focused on the linkage of the strategic parts. This cause and effect approach gave both context and connectivity to the overall strategic plan. In addition, the more altruistic, or ‘soft’ components were added as well.
If You Can’t Measure It You Can’t Demonstrate Your Value Added
Yet the most common response to creating metrics for quality, hard to count results or long cycle R&D projects remains “You can’t measure what I do”, “I can see how that would work in the manufacturing side but it won’t work around here”. ‘We tried that last year, didn’t work”.
Demonstrating The Quantitative Value Of Quality
A few simple steps can guide the process of discovering quantitative metrics for quality improvement efforts. If we consider and take ownership in the outcomes of our qualitative effort we go a long way to capturing a measure of our effectiveness. For instance, if we develop the skills of our leaders, and they impact the motivation and skills of our rank-and-file, what will change? The connection between people development and the resulting performance improvement can be clouded by many factors but, overtime, we must prove our efforts. Just a few examples of comparisons include:
1. Close rate of those that completed a sales training module vs. those that did not.
2. Average annual performance review scores of those leaving the company vs. those that stay. Obviously those staying are more likely our winners. But taken over time, as an average, what is the trend? Is it getting better or worse? Why?
3. Enrollment in company benefit programs as a measure of engagement, commitment and loyalty
4. Break down retention rate by department, supervisor, job description, tenure
Demonstrating the outcomes of your effort is obvious when your outcomes are quantitative in nature. Failing to own and communicate the results when the outcomes are more qualitative or long term is failing to make the business case for the critical contribution of your efforts.
Tags: balanced scorecard, balanced scorecard concept, balanced scorecard implementation, measuring worth, performance improvement, scorecard
Posted in bottom line performance, organizational change, performance, productivity, profitability, scorecard | No Comments »
Monday, December 13th, 2010
 Nearly every organization we have consulted with in the last 30 years creates pretty good metrics that track business results in a pretty decent way. We believe the age-old adage, “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Fortunately, initiatives that have been universally embraced by businesses, like Six Sigma, Lean Management, and TQM, thrive on gathering, tracking, and analyzing key performance indicators, meaning that we have a number of strong systems that help us measure so we can manage better.
The most important discovery we have made over the course of many years is that the data alone won’t drive your business to the next level of bottom line performance. We have learned that the way the data is used by leaders has a direct impact on whether the results they see are ordinary or extraordinary. The way leaders interact with the individuals with whom they work either has a negative or positive impact on the results that leaders so desperately seek. The key to leveraging the metrics and boosting employee performance is making the data meaningful to people. It doesn’t matter if you are a scientist or an assembly worker: if you know how your efforts contribute to key results, what those results mean, and how to make the scoreboard move in your favor, you tend to become more engaged and motivated by your work. The magic of metrics is all about how leaders coach, communicate, and solve problems with other members of the organization. They have to help people interpret the data and create metrics that feed business results, and they need to make it personal. If leaders can connect individuals to the metrics driving the business’ success at the very core, if they can help employees see how they fit and why they matter, then every person will suddenly become personally invested in helping the organization improve its bottom line.
The trick is having the ability to position, explain, and use the data in a way that motivates and inspires people. This power resides in the leader’s ability to support, coach, and assist employees, as well as work through the barriers and interference that they will inevitably encounter. There is no inherent value in data. Motivation doesn’t come from analyzing the numbers. Business performance takes a sudden leap when trusted coaches help the people around them figure out ways to be challenged and stretched beyond their perceived abilities. If people gather relevant data about themselves, about the factors that are critical to their own success, analyze those factors with a coach, and then set realistic, meaningful goals grounded in the information they have gathered, they are more likely to want to perform in a superior way.
If you already have a system to measure performance, help your leaders learn how to use that information to its maximum effect, motivating members of your organization at all levels to perform to the very best of their abilities. We can help you enhance you bottom line leadership using the resources you already have at your disposal—your people.
Tags: bottom line leadership
Posted in bottom line leadership, bottom line performance, bottom line results, coaching skills, leadership, performance, results based leadership, scorecard | No Comments »
|
 |
