COVID-19 was a game changer regarding our ways of working. Many companies were forced to change a typical on-site work style for remote work. That shift had pros and cons like everything does. On the pros surveys reveal better work-life balance, commuting time savings, or performance increase. On the other hand, managers notice risks in a higher rate of employees leaving. One of the biggest cons of remote work is that employees lose attachment with the company. The main reason is a lack of social interaction with peers and involvement in creating specific organisational culture. But the second is weak identification with the brand that often relates to the office and office events. Managers are brainstorming how to bring back people again to the offices and gain their loyalty, but in the post-pandemic world, it is not so obvious how to achieve it. Rules changed and nothing remains the same as it was.
I believe that everyone needs to feel purpose in life and feel that his work is meaningful. For me understanding how I contribute to the overall strategy, goals or company’s vision is essential. Many times, we lack those connections because of poor communication from the management side and a vague understanding of our role in the entire organization. Fortunately, we have a bunch of communication tools that can be used to improve mutual understanding and keep employees satisfied with their positions.
One of those I find helpful is one-to-one conversations. The one-to-one conversation has great potential in tracking performance, and most of the time they are only used for that. But what is much more important is having a deep and honest discussion with employees about their thoughts, sentiments, and aspirations. That knowledge gives managers the opportunity to react fast when a loss in interest is observed. However, be honest with yourself, how often do you have a feeling that your one-to-ones are not effective as they could be? What are they still missing?
From my long record, I rarely recall that those discussions were supported by some good information. In the majority, discussions were driven by opinions rather than facts. Wouldn’t be great to have evidence for our gut feelings? That precious time is too often wasted simply because companies don’t provide adequate tools to make those meetings more valuable and beneficial for organisations, managers, and employees. Writing “tools”, means collecting, analysing, transforming, and presenting relevant data to make sure that people are talking about facts, and not opinions. And yes, nothing stands in the way to use data for one-to-one meetings.
Of course, the selection of data and KPIs will differ across industries, businesses, and roles. However, some of those remain the same. The biggest challenge is asking the right questions and finding data that respond to them. The great starting point in the journey of creating KPIs that give you meaningful data-based one-to-one conversations are:
- Company strategy & goals,
- And the job description.
Company strategy &goals
As I wrote above, people like to feel purpose and connection. Why not use a narrative from the big picture down to the bottom and show employees how does he or she participate in the company’s growth? The more tangible connections between the employee’s daily work and the company’s performance you can find, the higher satisfaction the employee can have. Most organizations cascade down their goals. Thanks to that, we can simply provide proper KPIs and data visualizations to present departments, teams, or individuals’ contributions.
So, before the next one-to-one, if you do not do it already, would be good to talk with the business intelligence team, the sales team, or the finance team to get some shareable data about the business growth and current progress toward goals and the contribution share of your team.
Job description
The job description includes all expectations toward a specific role that can be converted into questions tracked by data. Typically, the job description has two parts that we can use for our purpose. First are responsibilities, second qualifications and skills. Responsibilities can shape our questions about current performance toward goals, finding challenges and their proper solutions or give us a clue on how to prioritise hot issues. Qualifications and skills are a great introduction to talk about employee directions of development, their ambitions and future career paths.
Business case
As a business case, I’ll use the Product Owner role. Depending on the industry’s and an organization’s characteristics main responsibilities, qualifications and skills can differ. However, for the purpose of this post, I’m picking those:
- Develops, owns, and executes product roadmap.
- Prioritizes and maintains the sprint backlog for assigned products, balancing the requirements of stakeholders.
- Translates product roadmap features into well-defined product requirements including features, user stories, and acceptance test criteria.
Expectations reflected in data
The product roadmap is one of the key drivers of success in delivering products. Without a strong and clear vision of what the product is and which characteristics and functionalities it has, it would be hard to develop anything. As a Product Owner, you should often review and update the roadmap to make sure that the vision of the product still reflects the market demands. On the other hand, the product roadmap is a base for the product backlog that consists of features or /and user stories that workload estimation gives the Product Owner a feeling about timely delivery. So, what kind of KPIs should we track to make sure that the roadmap is still valid?
Do all milestones are on the product roadmap?
The product roadmap usually includes milestones or bigger chunks that are broken down into smaller pieces like features and user stories. Tracking something that is not visible is a complicated task. Having one big picture of what is planned gives you the opportunity for proactive conversation. Having the possibility to see all relevant tasks for each milestone makes you ensure that you didn’t forget anything highly important.
Does the product backlog cover the product roadmap?
The first measure that could be interesting to track is the number of tasks under each milestone. The alert could be set up for those milestones without any created tasks. If you have the possibility to track the progress of the task, it gives you a feeling that pace of work is aligned with assumptions or is it faster or slower. You can then discuss options.
Do we have enough resources to deliver the agreed functionalities on time?
Time and money are always tied together. Looking at the roadmap we need to guess somehow the amount of work that is needed for development. For that, we can use story points, or man-days, or any other measure that allows us to compare team capabilities with the required workload. As a result, we can have a positive or negative gap. We wouldn’t trouble ourselves too much as long as we had a positive gap, but the questions would arise with a negative one. Should we narrow the scope or maybe find other people to help us?
Do features/user stories well-prepared for developers?
This question can reveal if tasks for developers are ready for development, or if some issues must be clarified still. We can use here RAG (Red for not ready, Amber for those in progress, Green for those that are ready) approach that gives us the status of tasks’ readiness. This status review opens a discussion about issues and challenges on a very low level that in the end can have a tremendous effect on the entire product development. To create RAG status, think about the most important entries, or fields on your feature/user story template. Then you can use a simple sum or a weighted one to calculate the indicator. Add conditions to differentiate between red, amber, and green (or not ready, in progress, ready). Now you have KPI to see which task needs more of your attention or has some issues to address.
To track these data, you do not even need fancy tools. The Excel spreadsheet will work perfectly. Of course, if you have the possibility to use more advanced business intelligence tools, please do not hesitate 😊
Addressing aspirations and ambitions
Most people I have known have their own aspirations and desires regarding professional and private life. Most of them if they cannot fulfil them in the current workplace are starting to look around for more favourable conditions. That is why the manager should remember to leave enough space for one-to-one conversations for discussing topics regarding employee growth. But again, the discussion is an exchange of opinions. Can we find some data to visualise how much time and effort is spent on learning and mastering skills activities?
More and more companies offer their employees learning platforms just to name a few Udemy, Coursera, and EDX. They are perceived as tremendous benefits by employees but only when they are allowed to allocate some time for learning. In the interest of any organization should be staff development. It has so many positive aspects for both sides, the employer, and the employees. I have an experience among organizations which had entirely different approaches to peoples’ growth. Some of them didn’t care at all about these needs, some of them gave the opportunity to learn but after working hours, some of them understood it as an investment and some of them required upskilling but without providing any courses or giving room for learning. But it totally different topic.
My point is that if you have such platforms in your organizations, maybe you can leverage them for:
- Verify together with your subordinate which courses would be relevant for mastering skills required in her/his position,
- Prepare together learning path,
- Agree on timelines,
- Allocate time per day/week/month for learning.
Most learning platforms share data or even provide built-in reports about users’ activity like a list of chosen training, amount of time spent in the application and on training, or progress on lecturer or practical activities. Isn’t it a great mine of information? Armed with such knowledge we can bring to the table tangible insights and have a proper conversation about employee growth. What we can definitely review in the first place is whether a person has the opportunity to use the dedicated time for learning or is snowed under with daily tasks. Or the exact opposite if you are sure that a person is not overloaded with work why she or he doesn’t take classes as is agreed? Another point for discussion can be reviewing new learnings and figuring out how this fresh knowledge can be applied to business, or if the subject is still relevant or should be changed. As you can see having those data we can start even think more strategically about the development of teams, departments, and entire organizations.
The above examples are only a small sample of enriching one of the processes within the organization. The huge challenge in making organizations data-driven is to design relative key performance indicators and create a habit of using them unconsciously by people. The main strategy to achieve that is simply to weave data into almost every process. The result can be that employees won’t think about data as something separately but as an integral step for achieving their goals. Establishing that common culture in the organization will support gaining market advantage like never before.
Convince Me with Data 