4 Ways Transparency and Dashboards Go Hand in Hand

Businesses and the leaders within them are using the phrase “need to know” less and instead are beginning to embrace an “everyone should know” mentality. In other words, businesses are adopting the idea of transparency at a rapid pace.

There are many reasons as to why transparency has become such a big deal, but one of the largest reasons is the ability to change behavior both in your staff and your customers.

If you’re not fully sold on the importance of transparency in business here are a few vital statistics:

• Transparency increases customer satisfaction by close to 20% (according to an HBR study)
• It also increases employee efficiency by 13% or more (according to the same HBR study)
• Transparency is the top factor in determining employee happiness (according to a Tinypulse study)

These benefits have led many businesses to look for ways to increase transparency. We often hear from our customers that one of the main benefits to using dashboards is the increase in transparency that they easily provide.

• Dashboards are one of the best ways to display metrics for tracking performance, and there’s no hiding from those numbers. If something isn’t going well, it shows, and that transparency will help your team to work together to address the issue.
• The data speaks for itself and creates transparency without a large amount of effort from management.

Here are the top 4 reasons our customers love to use dashboards to increase transparency:

1. Your team will be on the same page

An important benefit of increased transparency in a company is the ability to ensure your team is working together and with a shared vision. Studies show that when teams are on the same page they feel more confident, put more effort into their work and deliver more predictable work.

In order to achieve those benefits, you’ll need to help get them there. You could take the time to meet every day and ensure that everyone is on the same page, but that requires a large portion of time from you and your team.

A better way to do this is to put dashboards up around the office on computer or TV monitors. This will result in a quick and easy way to ensure your entire team knows what’s going on and can keep an eye on important metrics. In this scenario, you’ll want to place some of your KPIs on a dashboard in a place where your team can be instantly informed as they walk by.

2. You will align everyone with certain metrics to improve

Part of being transparent is keeping your team in the loop and sharing with them key metrics even when the numbers aren’t pretty. One of the benefits of being so open about your business’s metrics is that your team will know when there is a particular area of the business that needs extra attention and will be able to use the data to determine which methods are working and which aren’t.

It's proven that tracking key metrics and sharing them will increase the performance of your team when done on a long-term and regular basis. Whether you share in the form of a weekly report or you keep a monitor/TV on at all times for the team to see, you’ll receive great benefits from constantly tracking the metrics that matter most to your operations.

3. You’ll celebrate victories together

When you display your data on a dashboard for all to see, you allow your team to know when they have improved a metric. Seeing an objective finally achieved creates a great boost in company morale and brings your team closer together.

Think about the last time you worked towards a combined sales goal or customer satisfaction goal and you hit it. Surely you felt a great deal of accomplishment when you knew that you had achieved success in that area! Making your metric transparent and available to everyone not only allows them to experience the same feeling of accomplishment, but it also results in everyone working hard to achieve the goal.

4. You create a little friendly competition

In some cases, such as a customer service or sales environment, you can create a little healthy competition by putting everyone’s performance numbers up. This transparency allows team members to see how they compare to their peers and often results in an increase in performance. Our new leaderboard gauge was designed just for this and is a great example of how a dashboard can be used to create competition.

You do need to be careful not to create too much competition, but with a little creativity, you can display individual performance numbers while creating team based competition. When creating competition, keep in mind that you want your team to be working together to hit a metric, not working against each other.

How we use dashboards at BrightGauge HQ

Since we are a dashboard company, it only makes sense that we use dashboards all over our office, and the benefits like an increase in our team’s efficiency, are invaluable.

We track all of our customer support work on dashboards and display those on TV monitors around the office so that we can easily see how many tickets are open and also what phase they are in. This allows us to immediately see where we stand and helps to keep the team all on one page.

It also helps to shed light on which areas we need to dedicate more resources and time to by aligning the team with metrics to improve.

Because the dashboards are up for all to see, we can celebrate when we’ve hit an important metric and it also creates a little bit of competition when our team sees who’s leading in a certain metric.

Conclusion

Remember, transparency is a powerful tool to change employee behavior, customer interactions and ultimately your company’s bottom line. The easiest and most effective way to increase your transparency around the workplace is to use dashboards to display key metrics.

Dashboards are helpful because they:

1. Get everyone on the same page
2. Align your team with key metrics to improve
3. Boost morale when victories are achieved
4. Create a little healthy competition

See the other great ways dashboards can be used by checking out the BrightGauge Dashboardery.