In a previous column I wrote about the importance and value of not just “knowing your numbers” but “sharing your numbers” with the people who can influence your business’ performance: Your employees.
That’s why every day I send a scorecard to all of our employees, with real-time data on how we’re doing, right up to and including the previous work day.
How did I decide what numbers to share? Well, numbers are tricky. Sharing too many can just be overwhelming. It’s important to choose the numbers that are important to them – and numbers that they have an ability to influence.
Take current “total sales” figures, for example. It’s a number some of your staff — estimators and blueprinters, for example — will care about and can influence. But it’s not really something a body tech or painter has the same level of power to change.
My approach to sharing numbers is to start by thinking about what our insurance partners are measuring about us. We might not be measuring and sharing those exact numbers, but we are measuring and sharing the numbers that influence those numbers.
So what does our daily scorecard look like? First, it includes only about eight numbers. And while everyone has access to all eight of those numbers every day, what they actually get sent in their daily email scorecard is only some of those eight numbers, the ones most important to them, the ones over which they have some control.
For technicians, for example, that means touch-time, and how many total hours – and hours-per-day — each of our teams has racked up. And that scorecard starts fresh each two-week pay period. Technicians generally don’t care what we did for a quarter or even last month. They can’t influence data from the past. We want them focused on the current pay period, and the scorecard always tells them how many days are left in that pay period, just as an athlete can see how much time is left on the clock.
If you’ve been a tech — or watched your own — you’re probably familiar with the paycheck often being the first indication to some of how they did the last pay-period. It’s almost like a lottery scratch-off ticket, with the dollar amount seemingly a complete surprise. Our goal is that a paycheck is never a surprise because they’ve known the score all along, while they’ve had the power to change it.
Our administrative team gets different numbers — again, the ones they can best influence. They see our sales for the month, and what our current daily goal is based on our goal for the pay period. They see a rolling 30-days CSI number. They see our average days-to-repair. They see the total dollar amount of repair orders for which vehicles have been delivered but for which the files have not been closed.
And we’ve adjusted scorecards as needed. We’re added color coding — green or red based on how performance compares to goals — for the visual thinkers. We’ve sometimes added measurements employees have asked for, even if just temporarily. We had a period in the past when re-dos in the paint department were an issue, for example. So we added to the scorecard the number of days we’ve gone without a paint re-do.
I recently had yet another example of the power of sharing our numbers through this daily scorecard. We’d had some struggles with CSI for a brief period when we’d gotten too busy. But as I walked through the office first thing one morning, one of the women on our staff looked at me and said, “It’s back above 95 percent.” This was a gal who a couple years ago probably would have had no clue what our CSI was nor might not have cared that much even if she did. Yet she could tell me where we were in terms of CSI as of that morning even before I’d sent out that day’s scorecard.
Once you communicate that something is important to the organization — by tracking and reporting it — it generally becomes important to the individuals on your team, too.
