Business owners and managers are always on the hunt to help both their employees and company become more efficient. It makes sense. Getting more work done for less money means you can do things like pay employees more, hire new workers, get better perks, and have less stress.
So, what do people do? They look to external sources for advice and guidance. They hunt online and in leadership magazines on tips for getting the most out of employees. Claims like having meetings where everybody stands the whole time will make them 80 percent shorter are found, and suddenly all meetings are done standing up.
It’s not bad to do outside research, but often managers and business owners fail to look at a more important source of guidance: instead of looking at what other people in the world are doing, they need to start by looking at the data their own business is producing for ways to improve.
Quantifying All Tasks
Before you can start analysing your business’s data, you need to be able to collect data from tons of different sources. Basically, every part of your business’ performance, from the CEO to the lowest employee, needs to be measured.
Find ways to collect data from your employees’ work so that you can measure their performance properly. Don’t just focus on one specific data set, try to measure as many as possible. If your workers do multiple different tasks throughout a day, separate the data from each task as much as possible. This can include how much time they spend doing each task, their results with each, and the quality of the end product of the task.
Even how your company communicates with each other should be quantified, especially if you have remote workers. One benefit to virtual teams is the ability to measure and record their communications and see where mistakes are made or time is lost.
This doesn’t apply to just your employees though. In today’s automated world, many tasks fall to robots to accomplish. Measure the results here also to make sure your automated processes are as effective as they can be too.
In an ideal situation, every part of your business could be measured, but sometimes that isn’t the case. There will be situations and tasks that can’t be effectively measured, or available measurements might not tell the whole story. For example, how do you measure an effective meeting? The biggest measurement is time, but sometimes meetings go long because productive work is being done. So be careful when determining what to measure and make sure it accurately portrays the whole situation.
Comparing Data Collected
Once you’ve set up your measurements, it’s time to wait. Collect data over time so that you have a good idea of what is actually happening. Nothing is worse than deciding off of only a month or two of data, as you can’t truly see any trends from such a short amount of time. It’s advisable to wait at least six months to a year before making any major decisions off of data. That way, you get a complete picture of what is happening in your business.
So, you have a good amount of data ” what now? Great, it’s time to start comparing the data you’ve collected with each other and finding trends. Don’t just look at single sets of data, compare them against each other to understand what happened.
A great place to start is to examine periods where employees were more efficient than normal. Try to find out why they were performing so much better by comparing all of the other data sets you’ve collected. Did they work harder when deadlines were closer together? Did a specific employee leave the company that maybe was detrimental to the workflow? Maybe you had an incentive program that motivated workers?
Try to find reasons behind why your data is what it is. Explore multiple different reasons, as they may all contribute to increased efficiency. A good rule of thumb to remember too: correlation doesn’t equal causation.Just because two trends line up doesn’t mean they affected each other directly.
Experimenting with Your Data
Now you’ve delved into your data and found some trends. Before you create a department or business-wide change, you need to do some experimentation. This way, you can make sure the data trends you found are accurate before implementing them with the whole company.
When running the experiment, the first step is to create a control group. This could be a single employee or part of a department, but you want to implement the change to a set number of people. That way, you can measure their reaction and results to a change before spreading it to everybody.
Make sure to give your experiment plenty of time so you can get real results. It’s likely that your first month of the experiment won’t be accurate as employees either work too hard knowing they are being monitored, or are less effective trying to adapt to the change. After a few months of work, then you can see whether your change was effective or not by comparing it to that group’s previous data.
You can also compare your results to outside information. Did standing up in meetings improve their efficiency by 80 percent like the article you read claimed? Maybe it worked for their employees, but not for yours. Testing with a small group can prevent or guide what changes your business needs.
Considering Long-Term Results
Now you’ve done your experimenting and you are ready to implement a change. Before you send out that company memo and start training, take a moment to consider how the change will affect your business in the long term.
If you work both employees and machines too hard, they’ll break down or become less effective. When that happens, you have to decide whether to try and repair or replace them. Both will cost you money, especially if you continue to work them too hard. For example, if you notice that your workers are most effective under very close deadlines, and choose to keep employees under a string of nonstop hard to meet deadlines, they’ll begin to burn out. That means they become less effective, or possibly even leave the company for less stressful work environments. This will make something that was initially very effective for something that ruins productivity.
After you make a change, keep monitoring your data, especially around what changed. As you notice trends emerge, record and take steps to continue moving in the right direction. Making a company as effective as possible is not a one time project, it’s a habit that needs to be adopted into the business.
