Measurement
Measurement is the difference between science and guesswork – between substance and fluff.
Select the Measurement Information You Want
There are great many team-event options available for work teams that come under the heading of “entertainment”. Entertainment can be the right choice in some situations, as long as your organization permits a clearly-designated entertainment budget and as long as the activity is clearly understood to be entertainment. However, entertainment badged as training – “trainertainment” – is something to avoid, because it promises a work benefit that is not delivered, and also because fiduciary and due-diligence problems can result after the event from spending training dollars on entertainment. Measurement of results is one major way to tell the difference.
Team Dashboard™ in Summary
Team Dashboard™ is a proprietary measuring instrument for tracking team productivity against your own organizational performance indicators. It has been in use since 1996, and in that time we have collected over 10,000 norms – including norms which will be relevant to your workplace. Team Dashboard™ is not a personality-assessment tool or a fun quiz, but a properly-designed scientific instrument that directly measures team productivity changes at work. As far as we know, it is the only one of its kind.
Team Dashboard™ gives you two main readouts – a measurement of productivity change over time (examples follow) and a measurement of the exact impact of productivity change on your specific organizational performance indicators (one example follows). In the full Team Dashboard™ – below are only simplified samples – you also receive a tremendous amount of immediately useful diagnostic information. Team Dashboard™ is like an MRI for work teams.
Example – Getting the Work Done
Here we see a simplified, but real, set of Team Dashboard™ measurements for an organization (the Telstra Yellow Pages business which approached us for help with an upcoming deadline challenge). Seen at left, the major team productivity need identified from the first Team Dashboard™ measurement was in the area of getting the work done – would the team be able to handle a massive upcoming workload with very little thanks?
Seen at right is the measured outcome from a Team Results productivity-improvement program and follow-ups about six months later. Productivity has improved across the board in a sustainable and long-term way, but the largest single area of improvement is in getting the work done, the major area of focus for the tailored program we ran.
Example – Fitting in with the Organization
Here we see a simplified, but real, set of Team Dashboard™ measurements for an organization (an industrial client whose name we have protected, which suffered a $2.5 million per-day staff walkout at a major plant) that approached us for help with future industrial harmony. Seen at left, the major team productivity need identified from the first Team Dashboard™ measurement was in the area of fitting into the business– could some groups which felt very alienated from the business be brought back into the mainstream?
Seen at right is the measured outcome from a Team Results productivity-improvement program and follow-ups about nine months later. Productivity has improved across the board in a sustainable and long-term way, but the largest single area of improvement is in fitting into the business, the major area of focus for the tailored program we ran.
Example – Meeting Multiple Needs
In this example, we see a simplified, but real, set of Team Dashboard™ measurements for an organization (an automotive client whose name we have protected, and which needed to navigate a major taxation change) that approached us for help with business and sales-force continuity during the major tax switchover. Seen at left, the two principal team productivity needs identified from the first Team Dashboard™ measurement were in the areas of getting the work done – would the team be able to manage the giant tax switchover without harming daily operations – and fitting in into the business – would the team be able to include the support of sales areas who saw only problems, disruption and lost income in the tax switchover?
Seen at right is the measured outcome from a Team Results productivity-improvement program and follow-ups about eight months later. Productivity has improved across the board in a sustainable and long-term way, but the largest single area of improvement is in getting the work done and fitting into the business, the major areas of focus for the tailored program we ran.
Example – From Great to Greater Still
Here we see a simplified, but real, set of Team Dashboard™ measurements for an organization (Pfizer Pharmaceutical) which had already-excellent performance, but wanted to keep its world-leading edge. Seen at left, the first Team Dashboard™ measurement justified and validated management’s belief that there were no major productivity issues in the plant leadership team. The challenge was therefore across the board – could the leadership team maintain the highest standards of global excellence during the retirement of a Managing Director and the resulting promotions within their own ranks?
Seen at right is the measured outcome from a Team Results productivity-improvement program and follow-ups about six months later. Productivity has been maintained across the board both during and after the period of change, and in fact, has improved slightly on already world-class results.
Sample Performance Indicator Report
This is a sample of a report showing the exact impact of productivity change on a client’s specific organizational performance indicators. In this sample, the client productivity indicators are On-time delivery, Cost control, and Customer satisfaction in descending order of importance as rated by the client. These are the three colored tracking lines you can see at the top left, reflecting Team Dashboard™ measurements made before the program, just after the program, and a year later. The same information is shown as a radar chart at the top right.
At the bottom we see a summary chart, showing the overall result against the client’s own organizational performance indicators across the board. This shows a dramatic and sustained improvement in On-time delivery, Cost control and Customer satisfaction dating from the time of the Team Results program and delivering sustained benefit at work for – so far – at least a year.
If one or more of the organizational performance indicators is quantifiable in dollars, then Team Dashboard™ generates dollar measurements. As one example, with high-level resources client BHP Transport, the use of dollar-based performance indicators by the client identified a $1.5 billion income stream which was exposed about 40% to team dynamics alone. This dollar risk was protected by a Team Results program costing less than $20,000.
