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In June of 1986, the “Hand of God” helped Diego Maradona lead the Argentinian squad to a win over England in FIFA’s World Cup soccer final. That first goal (1 of 2) is known by most who follow soccer, even casual fans, because it was likely a handball and shouldn’t have counted. With the height of the ball, Maradona likely couldn’t have gotten his head on the ball alone (which he credits in part) and had the referees had a better view, England may have made it to overtime and, quite possibly, a win.   Why do we recount this story? Because goals shouldn’t be that hard. They shouldn’t require the “Hand of God” to help them be met or achieved. Goal setting and goal management are fundamental responsibilities of your management or leadership team and enabling them to do both, with the use of goal dashboards, can make them easier to realize - without resorting to divine intervention. Quick Links What is a goal dashboard? Why goal dashboards work  Types of business goals that can be tracked through goal dashboards  Achieve your business goals faster with BrightGauge's data dashboards! What is a goal dashboard? Simply put, a goal dashboard is a visual tool that allows you to manage, share, and gauge the KPIs that evaluate your progress on any goal, either short or long-term. Whether it’s your sales, customer service, development, or marketing team, you’ve got goals for the quarter and year ahead. A dashboard puts all the analytics you need in one place allowing you to monitor progress, align your team, and adjust as needed to make sure you hit your mark. Why goal dashboards work  Anyone who’s done any reading on goal setting is likely familiar with the concept of S.M.A.R.T. goals. The reason this strategy (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely) works, is because it provides a framework for the goal itself. Often we set goals that leave us with no way to determine whether we’re on track, made progress, or even, sometimes, achieved it. Goal dashboards facilitate the S.M.A.R.T. goal strategy in a variety of ways and allow you to effectively manage your goals, across your entire business. Further, research suggests that writing down and tracking and sharing goals results in more achievement success. S- First, they allow you to define specifics, especially when you’ve broken down a larger goal into something smaller. For example, let’s say for 2021 your sales team’s goal is to increase sales revenue over the year by 20%. The team can break this down by quarter, by team member, by client acquisition, and any of those measurements are accessible via a goal dashboard. You can then view, share, and drill down on these specifics over any period of time to assess whether you’ll hit that 20%. If it looks unlikely, you can adjust your strategy. M- Measurement is the bread and butter of a goals dashboard. It puts all the analytics at your fingertips, provides for reporting and sharing across your management team as well as the team responsible for delivering the goal. Further, you can design the goal dashboard to make progress clear (based on the style, color, or appearance), meaning measuring your progress can be at a glance before you move into strategy and analysis. A- What is success? With full analytics from each year, you can gauge and compare what’s feasible. If, for example, you set that sales goal at 20% yet your dashboard reveals that over the past 3 years the sales team has only been able to grow revenue by 10%, then you can adjust your goal. Without key performance indicators and measurable analytics, gauging what’s possible becomes more difficult. You want to set a goal that is challenging but feasible. Goal dashboards help you visualize that. R- Is the goal important to this team? Is it where they should put their energy? If sales revenue has increased, but client retention decreased, meaning you’re taking on new clients, but failing to keep them, then perhaps increasing revenue isn’t a relevant goal at this time. Goal dashboards, and the analytics you choose to include, can help you align your goals to your long term strategy. T- Finally, you want to have a timeframe to measure. Without benchmarks, without end points, how is your team to know whether they were successful? How are you, in leadership, able to adjust strategy and see where, in short term and long term goals aren’t matching up. Ideally, short term goals should act as mile markers for your long term goal. To use the same example for sales, to realize a 20% increase, you’d need to see a 5% increase over each quarter. Without keeping track quarterly, you may not realize you’re about to miss, or exceed, your goal. S.M.A.R.T. goal strategy is stressed in just about every goal setting endeavor for a reason: it works. All we’re saying is we have a tool to help you manage that strategy.   Types of business goals that can be tracked through goal dashboards  Not to overdo it on the sports analogies, but there’s a line from Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come,” and the same is true for your goal dashboards. Any team in your organization can “come” to a dashboard and find a way to use it as a valuable tool to achieve their goals, even if the goal isn’t building a baseball diamond in a corn field. If you build a tool that measures the KPIs that matter to that team, one that monitors their progress and allows them to shift strategies while staying in alignment, they will come. That means for your sales team you can set revenue goals, for your customer service team you can set client/customer happiness or retention goals, and HR can have recruitment or retainment goals. You can build out those goals across teams, across multiple departments, and even across the entire business, allow multiple team leaders to assess the long term strategy, their team’s role in that, and the smaller, specific goals their team must meet for the mile markers along the way. Achieve your business goals faster with BrightGauge's data dashboards! With a variety of pre-built dashboard templates and a fully customizable system with filters for your departments, BrightGauge’s dashboard solutions can help you stay on track, adjust when needed, and meet your goals, short and long term. You can use existing dashboards or build your own, depending on your needs and our team is ready to assist. Whether your goals are outcome or processed based, let our team help you determine the best way to measure your progress and score every time. Even if you need help envisioning that field of dreams, we can help. Get in touch today and let’s talk about what’s possible.

A necessity for any service team is a regularly-occurring stand-up meeting where team members can review what's going on with support action items. Stand-ups answer questions like:   How many tickets do we currently have open? What does our kill rate look like? Are we responding to tickets quickly enough? Is there anything that needs to be escalated?    Being proactive about this type of information allows service team members to provide the best possible support to customers while running an efficient and productive service desk.    So, how are you going about conducting your daily or weekly stand-ups?   This month, BrightGauge partner Paul Bischer, Director of Business Development at GRIT Technologies, shares his Service Team Huddle dashboard.   This dashboard provides an overview of the day's action items for the support team and is used to drive the agenda at daily team meetings by providing insight into open tickets, daily schedules, and any past due items. It also motivates daily conversation around performance metrics such as: % Same-Day Resolution Average Response Time Average Resolution Time   Service Team Huddle dashboard - view here This is a really great way to keep your team huddles productive, on-agenda, and time-efficient, plus it gives your entire team visibility into what's going on in the service desk as a whole. Visibility can be a powerful motivator, especially during this era of remote work.    To recreate this dashboard for your own team, check out the links below: Service Team Huddle dashboard (public view link) Service Team Huddle Buildout Key   Thank you, Paul for sharing your insights.   Please feel free to reach out to success@brightgauge.com with any questions you have!

Teachers can often gauge student engagement by how many are looking at the clock, waiting on a bell to ring. Your employees are likely no different. Your managers and team leaders can likely measure employee engagement by how eager your team is to leave at lunch, at the end of the day, and on Friday. While no doubt most of us look forward to our non-work lives, the most successful businesses are the ones with employees who have buy-in. Employees who are invested in seeing that a company succeeds are focused on tasks and objectives more than the clock. In fact, 71% of executives say that engagement is fundamental to their success. That’s not to say work-life balance isn’t essential (and a contributing factor to employee happiness), but employees who are engaged in business can have a significant impact on profitability, customer satisfaction, recruitment and retention, innovation and a number of other factors that help build business success. Because these metrics are so important, monitoring valuable employee engagement metrics can be vital to making sure you’re leveraging your employees’ energy and investment and turning it into a boon for your business.   Quick Links How the remote workforce shift impacts employee engagement KPI examples for monitoring employee engagement Using data dashboards to gauge employee engagement How to use insights from data dashboards to boost employee engagement How the remote workforce shift impacts employee engagement By now, we’ve all come to the realization that the workplace changes instigated by the Coronavirus pandemic may be more permanent than originally anticipated. Certainly this shift presented multiple challenges to businesses well beyond human resource concerns, but those cannot and should not be ignored. It’s always been far easier to welcome new employees into organizational culture when they had daily touch points with other employees and integration into an office environment. Similarly, team building and mustering alignment on key objectives was also easier when everyone was in the same place. Team building opportunities and familiarity with co-workers and business goals, from working together on projects to casual office banter, facilitated employee engagement in ways that often cannot be recreated in remote work situations. That said, there is definitely an argument to be made that, on smaller teams, video conferencing has opened a window into our co-workers lives that helps team building and fosters relationships. Further, workers report being happier working from home as well. But can that, does that, translate into employee engagement? It might. In May of 2020, a study found that 62% of employees said remote work was actually beneficial to their engagement.  KPI examples for monitoring employee engagement Regardless of whether remote work continues, there’s no debate regarding the positive impacts of employee engagement. Whether from home or from the office, employees invested in your business improve your bottom line, so it’s in your team’s best interest to understand the best ways to gauge employee engagement. One KPI example used to measure employee engagement is productivity. Workers who are engaged are driven to perform. They see value in their work. In turn, they are 21% more productive than disengaged employees. There are multiple ways to measure this, including revenue/employees, but there are other factors worth considering. Another KPI example for monitoring employee engagement is absenteeism. When your team wants to be in the office, feels connected to your organization’s mission or vision, and feels driven to deliver on tasks and projects, you’ll see a decrease in absenteeism. In fact, in a study, 63% of U.S. employers report a direct connection between attendance and engagement. In this regard, you can track and monitor team absences as well as employee churn. Engaged employees want to be at work. Another metric to consider when looking at employee engagement KPIs is efficiency. While productive workers deliver a lot of work, effective workers complete work correctly and with as little wasted time, effort, and resources as possible. You can gauge this by looking at trouble tickets, customer satisfaction, resource management, and the time it takes to complete standard tasks. A final KPI example for measuring employee engagement is customer satisfaction. Engaged employees want to support the businesses they work for and contribute to their success. Naturally, many of them will make the connection between customer experience and satisfaction and the success of a business. In response, engaged employees are more likely to extend themselves for customers and clients, reaching beyond expectations to ensure that coveted customer satisfaction. In turn, your business has returning customers who cost less to serve and sing your praises providing valuable word of mouth referrals. Using data dashboards to gauge employee engagement   While we’ve highlighted a few of the key KPI examples to gauge employee engagement, there’s actually quite a bit you can be monitoring in terms of your employees to fully measure their engagement and satisfaction. In addition to their individual performance and customer response, you can also be monitoring revenue, customer acquisition, and HR metrics like successful hires and internal promotions. In short, there’s a lot to look at. One of the best ways to track all of these different KPIs is through a data dashboard. Particularly when you use BrightGauge’s customizable dashboards, you can tailor your view to include all the metrics you’ll need to fully understand how engaged your employees are and how that’s impacting your customers and business’s bottom line. A visual tool to monitor all of these items gives you and your team a great overview of where you’re having success and helps you measure when engagement may be waning so you can respond quickly and effectively. How to use insights from data dashboards to boost employee engagement Employee engagement not only ensures business success, but it also helps your organization hire and retain the best people for the job. Considering these two very important elements, it’s critical that should you notice employee engagement KPIs waning, steps can be taken to reinvigorate your team, increase their feelings of connection to the business and teams and to their work. Data dashboards and their visual display allow you to draw connections between an employee’s task and business growth or success. Your ability to share this data with teams or individuals helps establish a connection between them and larger goals, making them feel valuable to your organization. Additionally, if you notice issues, scheduling meetings with team members or whole teams, depending on the metrics and encouraging their feedback allows you to address issues before they start to impact other aspects of your business. Finally, the ability to see and share all of this information with your employees fosters trust in your organization. Transparency is valuable because it’s inclusive and that inclusion translates to buy-in. If you’re looking for a data dashboard that’s fully customizable, providing filters that allow you to organize information the way you’d like it to be seen, that provides a bird’s eye view as well as a drilled down inspection of the metrics you care about, that allows you to monitor the engagement, productivity, and retention KPIs you care about, get in touch with our team today. Let’s see how we can help you turn or keep your team into one of your business’s best assets.