Publishing your KPIs

My5 KPIs - Dashboard
My5 KPIs - Company Overview
My5 - Sales revenue

Question: Should you publish your KPIs to all of your employees?

In our Insight articles, we have frequently discussed how Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play a central role in strategic success. As a recap, KPIs show businesses how each department – and the business overall – is performing at any point in time. Each KPI measures a strategic goal against the results using real-time data. This data is benchmarked in different ways – perhaps competitively or against other time periods. KPIs are also given limits of acceptability and often use the RAG system so that people can instantly see whether a KPI is on track, under-performing or over-performing.

KPIs take time, energy and coordinated effort, and they must be an ongoing priority to be useful to a business strategy. It’s also pretty obvious that they need to be known and understood across the business so that everyone can be focused and coordinated in achieving them.

Or not…

Surprisingly, however, most small to medium-sized businesses don’t publish their Key Performance Indicators – and this ‘low-key’ approach is one of the biggest strategy errors we see when it comes to success or failure.

Publishing your KPIs

If you want your revenue and profit figures to grow through your successful business strategy, you must make sure your employees know what you want to achieve. Otherwise, they will not get behind you, perform to their best abilities, and reap the benefits of success.

Keeping it simple

We’ve talked before about how Key Performance Indicators should be precisely what the name describes – Key – and therefore should be few in number. For any given area, for example, Customers, we would suggest 5 KPIs is the optimum number. Less and you are not measuring correctly, more and it becomes very difficult to keep everyone focused.

Once you have agreed on your KPIs – which will be a mix of lagging and leading indicators, comparative, and countable (all topics that we’ve covered in more depth in previous Intrafocus Insights) – it’s vital to promote and communicate them in a visual way that everyone in your business understands. We find that the KPI dashboard approach is the easiest way to do this.

KPI dashboards are visually immediate and can be completely customised to suit your business’s needs using your chosen KPIs. For example, by using specific and cutting-edge KPI software of the kind you’ll find in our app, you can create custom dashboards with your branding, different means of reading the data and intuitive information that meets your employee’s needs. The app may look simple, but it’s driven by powerful and cutting-edge Progressive Web App (PWA) technology that translates complex data into simple-to-read, attractive, meaningful dashboards.

Our new My5 KPIs mobile app

To help businesses easily organise and manage their key performance indicators, we are pleased to have launched our new My5 KPI mobile app. Displaying KPIs on a mobile phone gives instant and immediate access to all employees to your most important data. Other benefits of publishing your KPIs on a mobile phone include:

  1. Offering employees easy access, via their mobile devices, to the top 5-10 KPIs
  2. Sharing real-time dashboards that show precisely the value of sets of KPIs at any point in time.
  3. Allowing businesses to create a sense of engagement amongst their employees.
  4. Stimulating a culture where business improvement becomes owned by everyone and a source of pride and motivation – rather than something that is simply owned by managers.
  5. Ultimately, helping to grow revenue, profit and productivity by ensuring every single employee feels that they are personally responsible for delivering KPIs and are motivated to do so.

Businesses can amplify these gains by using their mobile KPI app as part of a wider internal communications programme for their business strategy and by ensuring that success is clearly linked to employee benefits, such as performance-related pay and bonuses. You can ensure everyone in your organisation knows what strategy success will translate into – or what’s in it for them!

My5 - Executive Dashboard

Why go mobile?

In his article Provide Employees with Anywhere Access, Michael Abboud cites research by ESG, the analyst firm, which found that a third of business professionals believe that mobile devices are crucial for productivity and process management, and 55% believe they are very important. Over 50% of respondents saw their value in boosting employee productivity and improving business processes. Intuitively, early access to KPIs helps to boost performance and productivity by creating engagement and ownership – and this is certainly something that we have seen at Intrafocus.

In conclusion

It’s almost startling to realise that a simple set of KPI dashboards that display 5-25 KPIs can mean the difference between success and failure. Given that a strong business strategy is key to a successful and profitable business, it’s a priority to ensure that you create the right KPIs and correctly communicate them to your employees and stakeholders.

Publishing your KPIs via an app makes this process smooth, streamlined and incredibly easy. Why not download the My5 KPIs mobile app today and see just how simple it is to create your own mobile KPI dashboards for your entire business?

Try the My5 KPIs mobile app for FREE

Find our new My5 KPIs mobile app: https://www.intrafocus.com/my5-kpi and download your free 30-day trial.