There’s generally more to do in a business than hours in the day. That’s as true for the small business owner as it is for the front-line staff.
Too often that leads to diverting what little attention we can muster to the thing shouting the loudest, regardless of how important that particular noisemaker happens to be in the grand scheme.
Exhaustive research conducted by the Gallup folks, and first chronicled in the bestselling book First Break All the Rules, suggested that one of the keys to employee satisfaction was a sense of knowing what was expected of them that constituted success in the job.
Many times we give people a job title, employee manual, training and, maybe if they’re lucky, a couple of processes and checklists for routine stuff. This approach practically guarantees that their attention will eventually be drained by the unimportant but urgent.
In addition to creating an environment that’s conducive to waste, there are two other very big problems with this approach. First, there’s rarely a way for the staff to connect how what they do fits into the big picture, and there’s no way for them know if they’re winning.
The best business is organized like any good game: there’s a clear objective, a defined set of rules and a way to measure if and when you’ve won. Lacking any of these, the game just gets boring and pointless.
The brand sessions
One of the ways that smart companies combat the damage caused by lack of focus is to systematically include everyone on the staff in routine marketing and brand-related training and education.
This can take many forms, but should include information on the basic marketing assets and stories. Everyone on the firm should be able to deliver a sales presentation, even if it’s only to their parents.
This should also include interaction with customers and prospects as well as a full description of all the upcoming marketing initiatives for the quarter.
In addition to providing the kind of information that helps the entire organization feel included, it creates an opportunity to link an employee's specific function to the overall success of the company. Managers need to make finding this connection one of their highest priorities.
The Action Scorecard
A tool I’ve seen that uses a very effective game element is something I’ve come to call the Action Scorecard.
The mechanics behind it are really quite simple. Each employee, either on their own or with the guidance of a manager, constructs a list of the 15 or 20 high-payoff actions they could take during any given day. This list would consist of items that if they were to choose between, say, checking e-mail again or doing one of these, the choice would be simple.
You can think of this as the default to-do list that would probably be quite different for each staff member.
The game part comes from assigning a score or value to each action step on the list and setting a total score goal for each day. As simple as a device like this may seem at first, it can become a great way to keep everyone focused on high payoff work, while giving them a way to assess success.
In the instances where I’ve seen it employed effectively, employees actually felt it allowed them to be more creative in their decision making knowing they had this tool to continually lean on as a sort of productivity checklist.
You’ll need to tweak and adjust both the steps and the value, but turning routine work into a game with a way to win is a powerful motivator and a great way to keep everyone’s focus on the primary objective.
Image credit: Jinx!