First things first – what is a wallboard?

A wallboard is a tool used to display key business metrics in real-time. Wallboards have evolved over the years from office whiteboards to office monitors that continuously display a business’ data.

Why you should be using a wallboard in your office

The answer is simple. Wallboards can dramatically improve your business. How you ask? Wallboards give businesses a clear view into their KPIs and allow all employees to have a better understanding of performance. Here are 3 reasons why every business should use wallboards to display key metrics:

Transparency

Using wallboards around an office helps promote transparency at all levels of the organization. When employees, management, and executives get a view of the same key metrics, the entire business is able to work and create priorities based around the same targets and goals.

Real-time business decisions

Wallboards let teams monitor and track key business metrics in near real-time. Imagine reacting to a drop in performance or similar urgent issues as soon as they happen, rather than at the end of the month. Your team also saves hours on ad-hoc reporting and meetings to discuss results. Wallboards are transforming how businesses and employees operate day-to-day.

Metrics-driven

Gone are the days where decisions had to be made based on gut feelings.Teams are exposed to real-time data on a daily basis and can see the results of their hard work. Wallboards keep teams focused on key business metrics and help to promote data-driven decision making throughout an entire organization.

Tips for setting up effective wallboards

By this point, it’s easy to see the benefits of using wallboards and to understand how they can transform a business. When looking to build and implement wallboards around an office, there are 3 components that you should keep in mind:

Actionable

When building a wallboard, ask yourself “What am I communicating and what do I expect my teammates to do with it?” The purpose of creating wallboards is to build a dashboard that teams can make decisions from. Your wallboards should display key metrics and targets that are actionable. Ask yourself, “Do these metrics help me make decisions?” or “Are these metrics helping me understand my priorities?” Wallboards should be created to help grow your business and empower your teams with the data they need to make real-time decisions and reach their goals.

Focus on dashboard design

Having a good dashboard layout can completely change the way employees use the data to make decisions. There are 3 guiding principles to good dashboard design:

1. The information most often checked by users goes in the upper left-hand corner;

• Related metrics should be grouped together; and
• Metrics that need to be compared should be next to each other.

If you want your wallboards to be effective, remember that less is often more. Having a simple and concise design makes it easy for employees to understand what the data is trying to tell them. Only highlight key metrics that have a real effect on teams and decision making. Just because data is available doesn’t mean it has to be included on a wallboard.

Easy

In order for wallboards to be effective, they should be easy too. Ideally, the wallboard is visible to the entire team from the moment the first employee walks into the office, to the time the last walks out. Depending on a team member to cast the dashboard to a screen creates interruptions and unreliability. Displaying your wallboards with little friction will help make them successful.

What’s the solution? A tool like Airtame can help eliminate these types of barriers. With Airtame, you can set up your wallboard and have it run independently from laptops or team members. The most effective wallboards are the wallboards that are easy to set up and continuously monitor.

Build your own wallboard with Klipfolio and Airtame

Interested in creating and displaying your own wallboards? Klipfolio and Airtame make it easy for you. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Create a free trial with Klipfolio at klipfolio.com

• Sign up for a workshop to learn how to build your own dashboards in Klipfolio
• Purchase Airtame to display your dashboards on monitors around your office
• Follow the simple step by step guide to set up your Airtame in minutes

The post How effective wallboards can get everyone on the same page appeared first on Airtame.

by Kristian Øllegaard, Managing Director, Plecto

Imagine a sports game where the players can’t follow the score on large boards across the stadium. Then, imagine losing a game by one point when you thought you were ahead. That’s the reality that many employees, specifically those in sales and customer support, live with every day.

Now, running a company isn’t exactly the same as a sports game, but there are key lessons you can easily apply to your business. For instance, in sports you have a clear target: winning the game.

Everyone from player to spectator knows the goal, its progress and how to get there. Targets in businesses might be harder to quantify, but if the target itself isn’t possible to define as a number, perhaps some of the tasks leading to it can be visualized.

Over half a century ago, Frederick Herzberg, author of One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?, found that you do not motivate employees with high salaries and espresso machines. Yet it still seems to be a common tactic in many companies, even “cool” tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and many others.

The truth is, if you really want to motivate your employees and engage them in their job, you need to recognize good performers. Even better, recognize them publicly, so that other employees clearly sees what it takes to get praise.

KPI dashboards boost performance

While most large achievements are usually given proper recognition by management, many smaller achievements that deserve recognition are forgotten or missed by management. This could be closing a good sales deal, getting positive customer feedback, or finishing tasks on time (or early).

So, how do you recognize employees better and more consistently?

In my experience, a great way to do this is to display all your key figures on large TVs around your office. Don’t show all your data, just the three most important KPIs for each employee, and why not color code your KPIs: Red, Yellow and Green. A green-coded KPI, for example, could signify a small achievement and would automatically be recognized by everyone else.

This isn’t just something I made up. A study conducted by Mindlab Intl at The Sussex Innovation Center shows that when carrying out routine, everyday tasks in traditional software, visualizing the KPIs boosts performance by 17%. Now, give me the name of a CEO or manager who wouldn’t like to see an almost 20% boost in performance?

You need to show it to boost it

When I talk to CEOs and Sales Directors, they like to tell me all about how much data they have and how many reports they could run.

In real life, however, those reports aren’t changing anything unless someone shares them. Not to mention, if I’m a poorly performing sales rep, I’m most likely not checking out the latest figures just to find out I’m last on the list.

Up until recently, it was a costly and cumbersome affair to set up TVs to display your KPIs in an enterprise environment. Fortunately, with Airtame it’s so easy that you can do it without help from the IT department (which should not be underestimated!). Airtame enables a Sales Director to show a KPI web-based dashboard in just a few clicks with their new awesome dashboard feature.

At Plecto, we use Airtame all over the office. While we love to see the KPI dashboards, we have found that the opportunity to share your screen is extremely useful in an everyday setting, even outside the meeting room. For instance, if you walk into our office, it’s very common to see our support or sales staff sharing their screens when helping each other.

Did you enjoy the read and are you ready to start using KPI dashboards to boost your employees’ performance? In that case, I hope you’ll consider trying out Plecto.

By following this link, you will get a free 3-month subscription to Plecto (Value: $1000+), a state-of-the-art dashboard for sales teams. No strings attached.

The post The Importance of KPI Dashboards for Your Sales Team appeared first on Airtame.