Effectively Tracking and Measuring Your Efforts

Every business has goals and objectives they are trying to accomplish. The most important ones will be based on growing revenue and increasing profits, and other ones will be based on certain aspects of the business that contribute to these first two. When you put everything together, you will end up with a short list of issues that are critical to a company's future growth and success. The question you have to ask yourself as an owner or manager is, what systems do I have in place that can determine if we are on track to address these issues and achieve our goals. Sales and revenue can easily be measured, but you need to examine how are you measuring the actions that can positively, or negatively influence these two primary areas.

As a sales manager, one of my responsibilities was to access the performance of my team on a regular basis. Since sales numbers alone can be a complex issue with any number of factors contributing to gains and losses, there had to be a more complex system in place to properly track actions and measure results. We wanted to be able to measure effort, effectiveness,and consistency in each persons performance to develop a true picture of their work. Often times there would be someone who was doing everything right, yet their efforts did not result in increased sales. We also had people who, quite frankly got lucky and were in the right place at the right time and their sales gains were not reflective of their efforts. To address these issues, we developed a score card that tracked actions and measured results. These "point sheets", as we called them gave credit for positive actions and consistent effort. The theory is that if you keep doing the right things over and over again, you will eventually achieve positive results.

While every business is different, the general concept of a score card can be applied to every department in the company and every person no matter what their job. Everyone has work tasks assigned to them from the owner down to the person emptying the trash. In my personal opinion, every one's actions are equally important in relation to the role they play, therefore every one's actions should be tracked and measured. The only way you will instill accountability is to monitor performance. It is much harder for someone to make an excuse for poor results when there is an actual record of their efforts. By drilling this concept down to an individual basis, you will effectively guide performance of your company as a whole.