Using BI to Create Accountability and a Healthy Culture
If your business is suffering from dysfunction, a likely culprit is lack of data visibility, which causes reactive instead of proactive management and leaves gaps between the business plan and its execution. Without data visibility, conflicting metrics and uncertainty spread across the organization, and culture decays. But perhaps the most damaging effect of poor visibility is weak accountability.
Improve Accountability with Data Visibility
Jon Thompson, CEO of Blue Margin, has found that accountability is among the most powerful tools available for driving human motivation across an organization. Watch the full webinar for the full context of that argument.
When looking to propel your company’s growth and improve culture, consider deploying BI dashboards to drive accountability. Research shows that people generally appreciate insight into their performance against expectations and like keeping score. Charles Coonradt’s foundational work on this topic, The Game of Work, explores why feedback speed and scoreboard visibility are more powerful motivators than compensation alone.
Dashboards connect directly to accountability for several reasons. They provide transparency through a simple visual system so employees can see the score, which increases motivation and performance. They help leaders democratize the flywheel, sharing the responsibility for advancing the value creation plan across the team rather than concentrating it at the top. Jill Belconis’ interview explores this dynamic in depth. Accountability also correlates with healthier team culture and higher employee engagement. Thompson writes in The Dashboard Effect that employees want ownership and a stake alongside executives in making an impact, and that sharing the company’s vitals creates the equality and engagement employees are looking for. Finally, accountability requires organizational alignment on metrics. Employees must be involved in defining their own metrics so that those metrics are reasonable, realistic, and within their span of control. This is part of what separates well-adopted dashboards from ones that generate resistance.
In this podcast episode, CEO Brick Thompson and Business Intelligence Consultant Greg Brown discuss how data visibility powers team and individual accountability. They address the common negative connotations associated with the word and explain how accountability, when built on shared data visibility, drives growth and a healthy culture rather than anxiety or micromanagement. Listen below or read the full transcript.
If you would like to explore how Blue Margin’s managed data service can help your organization build the data visibility that drives accountability and cultural health, contact our team here.
