It’s no secret that motivated employees are more productive, happier and all-around better employees. In fact, according to a study done by the University of Warwick, happier employees can improve productivity 10 – 12%

We’ve all dealt with employees who were great at their jobs, and those employees who couldn’t have cared less. If businesses want to maintain a competitive advantage and continue to grow their business, engaging and motivating employees is crucial. Sure there are those employees who are generally enthusiastic, those are the people who are easily motivated and work hard to grow the business regardless of what’s in it for them. But what about those who are less driven overall or cynical by nature? How do you, as an organization, motivate everyone on your team? It might come as a surprise, but utilizing employee data to engage and give ownership to individual employees can be a highly successful, if currently under-utilized approach to employee motivation.

When done in the right way, tracking, analyzing, and sharing employee performance metrics can be hugely beneficial to you, as a business owner, and your staff. We think that the number one reason this is so effective is because data allows you to empower your employees to do their job better and can help encourage them to better feel ownership over their position in helping the company grow. When employees feel as though the organization or job is “theirs,” then they feel a responsibility towards growing the company. This is sometimes referred to as pyschological ownership and many studies have shown that the feeling of ownership is an important indicator of employee motivation and performance.

Ok, but how do you use your data to help motivate and encourage ownership for each and every employee in your organization? Well that really depends on what data points you want to track and how you use those data points to improve performance throughout your business. There are some analytics that will be exceptionally helpful when shared with your team and some that you will want to keep all for yourself.

4 Data Dashboards for Employee Motivation

1. Celebrate Milestones 

You might think that you are great at celebrating your employees, but are you really? Maybe you take them out for lunch on their birthday or give them a big bonus check in December. These are great ways to make them feel special, but you should also be recognizing them for work related milestones. Is Sally’s five year anniversary coming up in May? Did Michael just get promoted to Director of Sales and Marketing? These are great opportunities to recognize your employees for the work they’ve done for you.

How can you keep track of all these milestones? For any date based milestones, consider setting up a dashboard using your Google Calendar. You can put all employees anniversaries, birthdays, etc into your calendar and then create a dashboard so you can get a clear snapshot of upcoming and past events.

2. Recognize Individual Achievements

Employees who are recognized for their work tend to feel more appreciated and have an easier time taking ownership for their portion of the company. So, did David just score a big contract that the company has been working on for six months? Recognize that!

Achievements for individual employees will probably differ based on your company, industry, the employee’s position within the company, etc. One of the most straightforward achievements is sales and it will probably be most relevant to your sales team. Consider building a dashboard that tracks your leads, accounts, opportunities, etc. Whether you choose to share this dashboard with your employees so they can track progress on their own or keep it to yourself is up to you. If you choose to keep it to yourself, however, it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re paying attention and recognizing those achievements. How are you going to motivate your employees using this if you aren’t actually using it?!

By contrast, if you choose to share this dashboard with your sales team, it becomes something that your entire team can regularly reference to see the progress everyone is making on their sales.

Your data dashboard used to recognize individual achievements will differ based on the sales software your organization is using, but here’s an example of a great sales dashboard.

EXPERT TIP: Not sure how to make a dashboard using your sales software? Let us help! Email us at [email protected] and we’ll help you set it up. And if your software isn’t one of our current widgets, we can work with you on that too.

3. Company-wide Achievements

We know that you, as the business owner or department head have ambitious goals you’re striving for each month, quarter, year or however else you measure time in your company, but are you sharing those goals wth your employees? What level of ownership do invidual employees have over the business goals in your company? How are you ensuring that your employees feel like they are contributing to those goals? Sure you are probably tracking your progress towards those goals on a consistent basis, but you should also be sharing that data with your employees! When you share the overall goals of the company with your employees and talk to them about how you plan to reach those goals, you’re bringing them into the fold. You’re basicallly showing them that they are important to helping the company reach it’s overall goals. Remember when we talked about psychological ownership earlier? This is a great way to help give that to your team.

As with #2, your dashboard for this item will need to be pretty custom to your organization. You need to ensure you’ve identified the key performance metricsimportant to your overall goals and build a dashboard around those metrics. Here are a few examples that help measure common KPIs:

Finances

These are helpful for companies who are trying to increase revenue, sales, etc. over a period of time.

Website

Trying to increase your overall website traffic or conversion rate? A marketing dashboard will help you measure the performance of your website.

There are many other KPIs that your company can measure in order to track your overall goals for the year. Just make sure that you’ve identified your goals and the key performance indicators you’ll use to measure them and use that information to set up your dashboards.

EXPERT TIP: Not sure how to choose your KPI’s? Let us help! Check out our FREE The Beginners Guide to Choosing the Right Marketing KPIs for Your Business ebook.

Company-wide achievement type analytics are perfect for sharing with your whole team. Think of it like a football game where everyone is cheering for the same team, but in this case your business is the team. By getting everyone in on the fun and being able to visualize the data and progress you’re making, your employees will feel like important team members. If you really want to encourage staff to pay attention to these analytics, consider displaying them on a TV in your conference room or break room for people to check regularly.

4. Identify Struggling Employees

In addition to the ability to identify and acknowlege your top performers, applying analytics to your employee’s performance helps you find the struggling and unhappy workers as well. As we discussed in the introduction, happy employees are more productive employees so you are probably safe assuming that those who are struggling in their work are probably unhappy as well. If you notice that certain employees aren’t meeting their numbers consistently, it’s probably a good time to pull them aside and talk to them about how you can help them perform better. They might have some insights into your processes that you haven’t thought of before. And just think, identifying the unhappy employees (especially when you run a large organization) would have been so much more difficult without data.

You can approach this dashboard in the same way that you approached the dashboard example in #2. Being able to track leads, opportunities, etc for a sales team (or other important metrics for other teams) will help you see the top performing players as well as those who are near the bottom of the heap.

Regardless of what approach you take towards using data to encourage your employees, the bottom line is that involving employees in the down and dirty of your business will help them take ownership of their job and the company. Those who take ownership of their position are ultimately more motivated and productive employees. Who knows, if you continue that encouragment, you might just end up with a team of people who stay with you for years to come.

Ready to start using data dashboard to measure your employees performance and start motivating them? Check out our FREE trial and start building a employee motivation dashboard today!