Would you like a happier and more efficient team? I’m sure you do. If you want a happy and efficient team you need to invest in a good data system. Let me tell you why…
There’s only so much a single person can achieve in a day. At least until some bright spark invents time travel. That means if you have a lot to achieve, you need to learn how to be more efficient with your time. If you’re running a company, you’ve probably realised one of the ways of doing this is to hire extra people. They might have more experience in an area than you or save some of your time so you can be more efficient in other areas.
Another way of being efficient is to get the best out of the people that work for your company. One of the ways to get the best out of your employees is to show them they are valued. You also need to set them some goals so that they are focused and know when they’ve been successful. You might use SMART goals, FAST goals, OKRs or something similar but it’s essential that they have a direction and some way of measuring success.
Your data is like another employee
Well, you can also think of your data and analytics system as another employee that joins your business. A good data system will allow you and all of the people working for you to be more efficient with their time. The system can uncover things you didn’t know about. It can also motivate other employees by showing them when they’ve done a brilliant job.
Just like employees though, they need some good direction and to be shown a little bit of love to be successful. If they don’t have this then they can cause disruption, uncertainty and a loss of focus.
A Good Data System
A good data system will do the following things for you:
- Take all the hesitation, worry and procrastination about a lot of the questions you ask yourself every day:
- How do I divide my marketing spend?
- Was that new product feature successful?
- Which of my products is most successful and why?
- How do I attract more high value customers?
- Which area of the business needs my concentration today?
- Help everyone else in the organisation make good decisions.
- In turn making everyone better at their jobs as they know when their actions have generated an improvement.
- They feel happier as they have succeeded in their role and can see the improvement they’ve made to the business.
- This then allows them more time to come up with ideas for improvements as they have the headspace and data to do so.
- Decisions can be made quickly, reducing your opportunity cost.
- Deliver the best version of your business to your customers enabling you to sell more.
A Bad Data System
Conversely a bad data system will do the following:
- Cause everyone in your organisation to become confused. You won’t know what the data is telling you and can’t make a decision.
- It always takes too long to get an answer to your questions.
- Sometimes you get sent in the wrong direction and you will make a bad decision.
- You will have frustrated employees. They will be confused as they can’t determine what they need to do to achieve their targets. They can’t make effective decisions and possibly will not enjoy their jobs because of this.
- Your customers won’t see the best version of your business as nobody in your business knows what that is.
- You won’t discover the not so obvious improvements you could make to your business.
- Employees will get frustrated as they can’t see the effect they’re having on the business. They might decide to take their talents somewhere else where they can see success.
- In the worst situations you will start to see a lot of unhealthy arguments within your organisation. Nobody will know which action to take next and you will probably have quite a few opinions on what’s happened. What tends to happen here is that those with the loudest voices win those arguments. This has two consequences:
- The ideal action isn’t taken.
- The employee that lost the argument, whether they were right or wrong, has no evidence either way and they get disgruntled because they feel they’ve not been listened to.
Data Companion can help
At Data Companion we love to create great data systems that help you make great decisions and give you the answers to your business problems. So if you feel you might be suffering from the effects of a bad data system we can help.
We can:
- Help you with data collection so you have confidence and trust in your data.
- Work with you to understand what your business goals are. Create KPIs and dashboards that are aligned with those goals and empower your employees to make great decisions based on those goals.
- Create systems using the data about your business so you can show the best version of your business to your customers.
If you have any concerns around your current data system drop us a line and we’d be glad to help.
