How to keep your KPIs visible during busy periods and peak seasons<\/p>\n
For some teams and companies,\u00a0KPIs<\/a>\u00a0come with an infuriating paradox.<\/p>\n The busier you are, the more important your KPIs become \u2013 but the less you look at them.<\/em><\/p>\n Why is that?<\/p>\n November and December are some of the busiest business months of the year. There\u2019s Black Friday, the run up until Christmas, not to mention the squeeze created by extra holiday days.<\/p>\n So as we get into the holiday rush this year, we wanted to explore the reasons why KPIs can become less visible, and what you can do to prevent this.<\/p>\n Are KPIs more important during peak periods?<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that your KPIs are\u00a0more<\/em>\u00a0important during busy periods \u2013 your KPIs are always important. But they do have the potential to change at a greater rate, so you need to pay closer attention to them.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because during periods of increased activity, your metrics are likely to carry more variance. For example, take a KPI you have become comfortable checking once a week. If overall business activity doubles then so does the potential that metric has to change. Now, checking it once a week is the equivalent to checking it every two weeks.<\/p>\n Good KPIs are also designed to spark action and support decision making. And because peak seasons represent a disproportionately large opportunity for business success, the actions we take and the decisions we make can have a greater impact.<\/p>\n For example, in retail and ecommerce, holiday shopping in the US in 2021 is expected to\u00a0rise 7% vs 2020<\/a>, totalling $800 billion. But it\u2019s a market that also carries enormous amounts of risk, especially this year \u2013 as a result of everything from supply chain disruption to\u00a0unpredictable consumer behaviour<\/a>.<\/p>\n Simply put, bad decisions during this time can end up costing you more.<\/p>\n KPIs create focus for your team<\/p>\n KPIs are especially important for your team during peak season.<\/p>\n The first is motivation. Visible KPIs are a great source of\u00a0intrinsic motivation<\/a>, especially when they establish the connection between your team\u2019s hard work and the company\u2019s overall purpose. As the work comes thick and fast, it\u2019s very easy to become overwhelmed and disengaged. Whereas regularly being able to see your progress, in the form of live KPIs can create a sense of pride, ownership and renewed motivation.<\/p>\n The second is focus. It\u2019s possible for your team members to go off on a tangent if they don\u2019t have a clear sense of goals and priorities. In normal times, this isn\u2019t good, but during busy periods, wasted time and resources can be far more damaging. KPIs are one of the best tools you have for continually aligning your team\u2019s work around your priorities. But this only works when those KPIs are front of mind.<\/p>\n Why can KPIs become less visible during busy periods?<\/p>\n If your system for communicating KPIs suffers from even minor issues related to\u00a0access<\/strong>\u00a0or\u00a0understanding<\/strong>, then those issues will be exacerbated during peak season.<\/p>\n There are many reasons you might not be able to\u00a0access<\/strong>\u00a0your most important data:<\/p>\n Similarly, there are many barriers to\u00a0understanding<\/strong>\u00a0your most important data.<\/p>\n Overcoming these barriers requires work \u2013 whether that\u2019s the mental work involved with understanding a bad data visualization (such as a huge spreadsheet or, worse,\u00a0a pie chart<\/a>), or the physical work involved with getting a colleague to run a report for you.<\/p>\n During quieter periods, we might not even register these tiny tasks as anything other than a mild inconvenience. But during busy periods, when stress-levels are high, and our bandwidth is completely dominated by other things, it\u2019s often the tiny tasks that are the first to go neglected. It\u2019s the business equivalent of letting your laundry pile high, or not washing the dishes.<\/p>\n Viewing your KPIs is crucial practice (and you likely already know it is). But as a task, it just doesn\u2019t always feel as urgent as the most recent customer call you received, or responding to that last email from your investor.<\/p>\n How can I make my KPIs more visible during the holiday rush?<\/p>\n You need to increase the visibility of your KPIs \u2013 but at the same time \u2013 reduce the work needed to access and understand your data.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with reducing the mental work that goes into understanding your data.<\/p>\n If you haven\u2019t already, you should create a live\u00a0dashboard<\/a>\u00a0for your most important KPIs. Your dashboard should be understandable at-a-glance. That means: if it spreads across multiple screens or requires you to click around, then it\u2019s not really a dashboard.<\/p>\n If you already have a KPI dashboard, you should think about how you reduce the mental work involved in understanding your dashboard (sometimes we refer to this mental work as the \u2018cognitive load\u2019). We recommend taking a look at our free ebook on\u00a0how to design and build a great dashboard<\/a>.<\/p>\n Next, you should reduce any and all tasks associated with accessing your KPIs. Make your KPIs come to you \u2013 not the other way around. If you work in an office, the best way to do this is by putting your dashboard on a TV on the wall. Checking your KPIs will become as intuitive as checking the time.<\/p>\n If you work remotely, there are some great alternatives. Think about the spaces in which you and your team are most present \u2013 your emails, your Slack channels. Create regular, automated snapshots of your dashboard that come direct to you.<\/p>\n However you choose to present your KPIs \u2013 focus on reducing the work involved in accessing and understanding your data. If you can do this, even for the tiny tasks, you will ensure your data is there when you need it the most.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How to keep your KPIs visible during busy periods and peak seasons For some teams and companies,\u00a0KPIs\u00a0come with an infuriating paradox. The busier you are, the more important your KPIs become \u2013 but the less you look at them. Why is that? November and December are some of the busiest business months of the year. … Continue reading How to keep your KPIs visible during busy periods and peak seasons<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[32,79,43,26,68,78],"class_list":["post-2678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-analytic","tag-bi","tag-dashboard","tag-data","tag-kpi","tag-visualization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2680,"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2678\/revisions\/2680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mintea.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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