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How to Engage Employees in Tracking and Achieving Goals
DEANNA WALKER | VENTURITY
Venturity Financial Partners offers outsourced accounting and fractional CFO services that help growing companies operate more efficiently by providing operationally-focused financial information.
Is everyone on your team working towards the same organizational goals right now? Does every person know how their daily contributions impact those goals? Does everyone have a clear picture of the current and forecasted financial state of the company?
In truly great cultures, employees know that the work they do matters, they can see the impact they are having, and they are recognized and rewarded for it. In a culture of performance, clear performance measurement systems work together to give everyone the information necessary to drive success. By engaging employees in tracking and achieving goals, you position everyone for a successful future.
Especially in times of uncertainty, putting systems around individual and organizational performance takes the guesswork out of performance management and predicting outcomes. In this latest installment of Stepping Up, you’ll meet four leaders who are seeing the hard work of building a culture of performance pay off — and they’re sharing the systems and tools they use to propel their organizations forward.
Here’s how to set goals, share financials, and manage performance like a Small Giant.
TEAM-DRIVEN FORECASTING
It may seem counterintuitive, but now might be the best time to be financially transparent with your team. People want to know what’s going on, and if you’ve got the right people on your team, they’ll want to do everything they can to positively impact the numbers.
Likewise, holding back the truth about your company’s financial position often backfires — instead of relieving your team from the burden of worrying about the numbers, you’re creating space for speculation and rumors to run rampant.
So how does financial transparency and forecasting as a team work during a crisis? Here’s how it’s playing out inside of two open-book organizations.
When thinking about what has gotten Venturity’s team through the COVID-19 crisis so far, Deanna Walker’s answer is clear: open-book management. Their team has been playing the Great Game of Business for three years now, and it’s given the entire team a clear playbook for navigating this time.
“Three days into the pandemic, I thought to myself, ‘Thank God for open-book management,’” says Walker. “Everybody knew what they needed to do right away, down to the client level – we already had the tools in place and it gave us a system to follow.”
The team forecasts for the current month on a weekly basis, and now they’re re-forecasting for the year at the beginning of each month. At the team level, they’re tracking how client decisions will impact the numbers and using tools they already have to forecast what it will mean for the company. They don’t always like what they see, but staying on top of it allows them to make informed decisions and get ahead of the curve.
But most importantly, this wasn’t a top-down process — the team drove the effort. Because the team is trained to think and act like owners, they knew how to move the ball forward on their own.
“Our people knew what to do,” says Walker. “It freed up space for the leadership team to focus on larger, strategic goals and live in the moment of what we were dealing with. Owning the financial piece also gave our people stability and insight into where they stand individually.”
Bonus! Should all companies open their books? The short answer is no — first, you must ensure you have the right team in place and a culture built on trust, shared values, and transparency. At Venturity, it all started when Walker and founder Chris McKee attended the Small Giants Community Summit for the first time in 2015.
“It inspired us to work on our culture,” says Walker. “We started putting systems around taking care of our people and building a strong foundation for our culture. Open-book management was the icing on the cake that gave us the methodology and discipline to enjoy the fruits of our labor.”
A culture of performance creates trust and a strong foundation for your team, all while systematizing the things that matter most to your company. Without clear metrics at the organizational and individual levels, your employees are prone to feel misaligned, unmotivated, and unsure of how to achieve what’s expected of them.
Maybe your leaders are great at running their departments, but you wish they’d think about the bigger picture. Or maybe you’re interested in financial transparency, but you don’t think your employees will care about (or even understand) business finances.
Your emerging leaders have untapped potential, they just haven’t found the right training program yet. The Small Giants Leadership Academy guides your emerging leaders through a year of learning and connecting, introducing them to the systems, tools, and people to take their leadership — and your organization — to the next level.
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What do these leaders have in common?
These leaders are part of Small Giants companies — companies that prioritize their purpose and culture and invest in their emerging leaders.
One way Small Giants companies invest in their next generation of leaders is by enrolling them in the Small Giants Leadership Academy. This robust one-year certification program consists of virtual learning sessions with expert leaders and coaches, an extensive resource library, on-the-ground meetups with your cohort, a leadership assessment, and your event ticket to two Small Giants gatherings.