As the name suggests, Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are key. Organisations of any size or sector will have KPIs of some sort, helping them to focus their efforts towards a common goal. But what are they exactly?
KPIs allow companies to measure the effectiveness of any business objective. It gives businesses tangible means to evaluate if targets have been met, how well they achieved their goals, and if objectives need to be reassessed.
All levels of an organisation can benefit from having constructive KPIs. A business can have high level KPIs, such as evaluating the overall success of the company that year, and low level KPIs, such as the amount of customers that were acquired by the Sales team in the first quarter. Ultimately, KPIs will differ from company to company, from team to team, and sometimes from individual to individual. KPIs are there to act as a framework against which success (or not!) is measured.
KPIs give businesses and team members a goal to work towards. Without any objectives to achieve, staff will be working blindly and without direction, and senior management will be unable to grasp how their business performed during a given timeframe.
What’s important to remember is that KPIs should be unique to the business and not be driven by some arbitrary industry standard. A startup initiative, for example, will underperform if they are working to meet a KPI that has been set by a global corporation. What’s needed is a realistic set of targets that are both achievable and challenging, helping to develop business growth and improve performance.
It’s one thing for KPIs to be set and reviewed by senior management. It’s quite another for this data to be shared amongst the whole company.
Promoting the company’s KPIs means increasing the visibility of the company’s goals. Communicating this vital information to your staff ensures that everyone understands what they can do to help and how they can get involved in moving the business forward. A company with clear goals and transparent internal communications will ultimately have a more engaged and focused workforce, as employees will have a greater understanding of what the business is trying to achieve. And there’s no simpler way to promote KPIs than on your online intranet software.
Your organisation and employees are likely to be using intranet software within your digital workplace to help accomplish the goals set by your KPIs. You may be using Business Process Management (BPM) software, for example, to handle customer support enquiries. Or you may be using project management software to deliver client projects. In any case, with this vital information already available on an existing system, it makes sense to leverage this data and start promoting it to all intranet users.
Adding KPI dashboards to your intranet platform is a quick and easy way for employees to view this data at-a-glance and as soon as they login to the system. For example, intranet metrics such as the number of enquiries submitted during any given time or which employees are handling the most tickets can be displayed via dashboards on the homepage.
Promoting your KPIs using your existing intranet software has other benefits too. As the data is within the system already, the intranet KPI dashboards will refresh automatically in real time whenever an update is made. This means employees will have constant access to up-to-the-minute KPI information.
KPIs are intrinsic to business growth and development. With the process of setting KPIs and the data they generate already in place, the next meaningful step is to promote this information on the company intranet. This will inform team members about the contribution needed to meet company goals, increasing engagement and productivity.