Measurement of your success in your business or personal life can rarely be accurate using the bottom line numbers alone. An individual may be deeply in debt after fighting a battle with cancer, yet feel a deep sense of appreciation for life and a re-commitment to their dreams. Their bottom line wouldn’t offer the full picture for this person.
Nor does the bottom line alone offer much insight into the health and vitality of an organization. A business can be in the black after making significant cut backs to stay afloat, yet be further from achieving their dream than at any point in their history.
In order to know where you really stand, it’s important to keep score in multiple areas. At Edge of Change, we measure the strength of companies using financials as well as business culture strengths.
One of the most important things we can measure is the level of productivity at a business. A lean, mean workforce will not benefit a company in the long run if the productivity of the remaining staff suffers. A large workforce that has low productivity unnecessarily burdens a business with extra costs and generally more red tape.
At Edge of Change, we use a team diagnostic assessment to measure productivity in a business. We have identified seven different markers of productivity in business and score the health of a company based on these strengths. How would your team stack up? And even take this out of the workplace and ask how your family measures up, your community, and even on the personal level – where do you stand with these productivity strengths?
- Goals and Strategies: The team has clear, challenging objectives; there is alignment on strategies and priorities. Objectives are linked to recognition, rewards, or compensation. The team is highly resilient and not easily defeated in their goals.
- Alignment: There is a sense of common mission and purpose. The team values cooperation, cohesion, and interdependence. The team collectively owns their results.
- Accountability: There is clarity of roles and responsibilities with higher follow through. When problems arise the team responds. Team members actively hold each other accountable for team agreements.
- Resources: The team clearly requests, obtains, and manages adequate resources and training to meet its objectives. There is sufficient expertise to accomplish the team’s objectives. This is an atmosphere of “win-win” rather than “when one person wins, it means someone else loses.”
- Decision Making: The team has clear and efficient decision making processes, which have proven effective over time.
- Proactive: Change is embraced and seen as vital to this team and to the larger organization. The team is nimble and flexible in addressing opportunities for change, responding positively and creatively.
- Team Leadership: There is a strong sense of team leadership; team members take initiative to provide leadership as the need for initiative arises. The team leader or sponsor’s role is clear and supportive of the team as a whole.