Disengaged employees cost companies as much as $550 billion every year in lost productivity. As a result, frustrated companies are looking for better ways to increase employee accountability. But increased accountability on its own creates a culture of micromanagement that leads to unhappy workers. This, in turn, has a negative impact on employee productivity.
Are you frustrated that everything isn't getting done from one meeting to the next? You’re not alone! Many of my client leadership teams have expressed similar frustrations over the last year. Frustrations were cropping up in two main areas that had a low completion percentage:
Teams were only seeing completion rates of 40-50% of their To Dos, but they drastically increased their weekly completion percentage to 90%+ consistently.
Want to see your team's completion rate skyrocket like that? Here are 7 steps to getting all of your team's To Dos done every week.
Data is key to getting things done. But data is just an indicator, not an objective. It’s our use of data that truly drives results.
“Expert” may be a level of status for which we strive, but many “experts” have a gift for complicating things. Take a recent client conversation, for example.
One team member positioned himself as an expert in data. He created a list of the top 37 data points he felt the company needed to measure. When asked for the weekly goal of each metric, the data expert shared two reasons weekly goals were very difficult to define:
This client has struggled for months to understand what the health of their business was each week.
The stats on employees and their workplaces are staggering:
And the result is a huge gap of accountability throughout the organization. How can we defy the statistics and effectively raise the level of accountability?
A client reached out recently with the following:
“Stacy and I are planning to have a ‘difficult’ conversation with Joe tomorrow. His performance is leaving a lot to be desired. I suspect he will be surprised. We plan to talk in terms of core values, capabilities and accountabilities, but acknowledge that Stacy and I may have created some of this problem by stepping in and assuming some of his responsibilities (rather than holding him accountable). He may be in the wrong seat and, as we define the seats on the Accountability Chart, he may be better suited for a different role. Did we screw up?”
