Tying Employee Performance to the Strategic Plan (Part 6)

April 30, 2014 Strategic Planning Comments Off on Tying Employee Performance to the Strategic Plan (Part 6)

Continuing the discussion this month with “Visual Management to Show Continuous Progress and Status”, let’s look deeper into how to define and use visual management tools.  The key to visual management is that it needs to be easy for people to use and the information displayed needs to drive improvements and track performance to a defined goal.  Performance data is what is important and needed to drive the business and this comes full circle back to the first step, developing measurables and key performance indicators (KPI’s) that really drive what you do and when managed and measured tell the truth about the business.

KPI’s with goals associated and identified on the visual management tools provide people with something to strive towards.  Yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and even possibly by the minute measurements can be taken and shared.  Trends can be developed and projected to show progress or lack of towards the goal.  Departments and people can be held accountable to the trend and congratulated when they meet expectations and changes made when results are lacking.  This can be an enjoyable part of the management process.

Two easy to use visual management tools that can be easily implemented and used are magnetic white boards and flat screen monitors.  The magnetic white board allows data to be placed on the board while comments can be written as required to help with communication.  Spreadsheets and simple graphs can be created for the KPI’s with the goal plainly identified and placed on the white boards.  Meetings can take place at the white boards and updates can be made to the sheets at the meetings with notes placed according on the board.  Similar action can be taken with monitors.  The benefit monitors have over white boards is the data on the monitors can easily be updated live and the information can be viewed on multiple monitors including mobile devices so everybody that needs up to the second updates can have them.

Technological advances in hardware and software are driving the use of live data to manage making the use of visual management tools more important than ever.  For example, the output and run times of machines in the facility can be tracked and adjustments make instantaneously offsite.  The future will provide more tools and easier use of the tools but in the end it is critical that the process is defined, tracked, managed and reported to verify performance meets expectation.

Coaching these skills is a critical part of what we do.  We are here to help you develop and implement your Strategic Plan and coach and develop the skills to implement the plan successfully.

We are having great success coaching and implementing these methods and skills and our clients love it!