If you don’t measure performance in business and measure it correctly, the chances are you won’t be able to create the kind of infrastructure that drives you forward and leads to success. While it’s not the only thing that is vital to business success – the drive and enthusiasm of team members being less easy to measure – it can help you make changes that boost productivity and propels you in the most profitable direction.
There’s a well-known business saying that is apocryphally attributed to Philip Drucker:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
This is not strictly true, and Drucker never said it anyway, but it has a point. A better way to put it might be: “If you can measure it, you can manage it.”
We have access to more data at the touch of a button nowadays than ever before which makes it easier to measure performance in business. Marketing campaigns and product launches can be monitored closely, demographics and their interest measured by a variety of metrics and a deeper understanding gleaned of what is happening in your business at any particular moment, including how staff are performing.
The Benefits of Key Metrics
Discovering which activities have the biggest impact on the growth of your business is, of course, vital if you are going to have good information. Have you got the right people in the right jobs? Should you be targeting a certain demographic? How are customers responding to your product? Where do you stand within your industry? Are you using the right software and IT structures that deliver opportunities for success and growth? There are plenty of questions that your business needs answers to and metrics, wisely chosen, can make all the difference to your decision making process, which is why it’s important to measure performance in business.
- Target Marketing Better: One area where a measure of performance in business is very useful is marketing. It’s much easier to do nowadays with a variety of tools available for calibrating online activity. That can allow you to see clearly how a particular blog article, Tweet or Pay Per Click advertising campaign is working and, more importantly it allows you to change your approach based on solid evidence to improve your reach.
- Prioritise Work Practices: How everyone in your team fits together is also important. More businesses nowadays are incorporating staff measurement into their operating procedures and it’s not just about productivity but gauging, as far as possible, how individual employees feel about their jobs and their future careers. It’s one of the key areas that is helping entrepreneurs source and keep top talent that can help their businesses grow.
How to Measure Performance in Business
At Virtalent, to work out how t measure performance in business, we choose a performance dashboard app called Klipfolio which provides all the tools we need to monitor how we are doing. The system provides metrics on a number of parameters which are available at the touch of a button. That means we don’t have to wait until the end of the month to see how we’ve performed, we can get regular updates as and when we need them. This kind of responsiveness is indispensable in today’s competitive environment.
Our advice is to look for a performance measurement service that fits your business. That will mean one that is easy to understand and use and one which gives you the scale and scope you need to achieve a clear overview of your current status. It allows you to act more responsively as well as more proactively, spotting trends and potential problems before they happen and putting in measures that benefit your business long into the future.
It won’t solve all your problems but it will give you the ammunition to make many changes that are good for your company.
