It’s clear that using key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess team performance is a good idea.
KPIs are the scorecard of your business. A few carefully chosen metrics can give you meaningful insights, can help you motivate teams, and make better decisions.
KPIs can be extra valuable too, especially when you display them on a digital dashboard for all to see. Having an analytical dashboard on display can replace your weekly PowerPoint presentation because the information that managers need to lead will always be available.
This article gives you a quick low-down on KPIs, the sort of data you should choose for them, and how you can display them on an invaluable KPI dashboard using monday.com.
The basics on KPIs
Numeric values are the best source for a KPI metric. Numbers are easy to display in a meaningful way, are not subjective, and make it easy to compare time periods. It’s also beneficial to choose key metrics that you can affect with your own efforts. There’s little value in marking your team’s performance with a KPI derived from external factors which isn’t related to your department’s strategic goals.
For example, a customer support team shouldn’t use the number of product defect tickets they receive as a KPI. Sure, they will want to record the figure, but this is not the right KPI for them. It belongs to the manufacturing team, not customer support.
Draw up your KPIs using the SMART framework. This means your KPIs should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
Read more to this topic in our article: How to choose KPI
The KPIs chosen by the decision makers should result from a brainstorming session, further discussion, and agreement from all stakeholders. You can track performance with multiple KPIs that are a mix of high-level and low-level data points. A high-level KPI might be your monthly sales totals, a low-level one being the daily tasks completed by your team.
Just because something is measurable by numbers doesn’t automatically make it useful ― you should carefully choose your KPIs.
Finally, it’s best if you can collect the data needed for a KPI automatically. Inevitably, a KPI that requires someone to assemble data manually may result in the task taking second place behind the demands of day-to-day ‘real work. Fortunately, if you use monday.com, you can automate your KPI data collection and display them on an attractive digital dashboard.
Read also: KPI for project management | KPI for marketing
What is a KPI report?
KPI stands for key performance indicator, and they are values that measure the effectiveness of a certain business operation or output.
It’s possible to group and organize KPIs by management teams to develop an overview for an entire department or even the entire company’s performance metrics. This is the basis of KPI reports and KPI tracking.
KPI reports are carefully grouped and arranged KPI measurements designed to give management the tools to track, analyze, and monitor the most important facets of their operational output. When grouped together, strengths and weaknesses can be easily assessed, trends can be established, and goals can be set.
KPI reporting would have been undertaken manually in simpler times, with data collected from documents and databases produced over the period in question presented in a report. However, the contemporary use of intelligent software tools has made the task of business KPI reporting simpler, more streamlined, and significantly more accurate.
Why is KPI reporting important?
If you’re an employee who has had to receive and respond to your own KPI data, you’re probably less convinced of their utility compared to the people who create and monitor KPIs. But the value of collecting and proactively responding to KPI performance in a company cannot be overstated.
Here are just a few of the key benefits of regularly producing KPI reports:
- Assess the effectiveness of operations: Is what you’re doing worthwhile? Are you effective in your day-to-day operations? Are you achieving the stated company goals according to the mission statement? There may be more tangible markers of company performance in real life, but these are abstract measurements and don’t possess the accuracy and reliability that numerical KPIs do. Effective KPI reporting is the most robust method for tracking company performance empirically.
- Benchmarking and business goals setting: Business growth is what everyone is aiming for, but growth as a concept requires a starting point to substantiate it. KPI reports can be recorded and traced back for years, perhaps even decades, as evidence of growth. They provide markers with which to set a new strategic plan.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses: Because the scale of KPIs is variable — individual employee performance vs. company-wide performance — they can act as great tools for identifying the strengths and/or weaknesses that are contributing to the current position. Adjustments to team arrangement or a sales target can then be made accordingly.
How to generate automatic KPI reports regularly
If you’re in a management position, the prospect of KPI reporting set to automatic mode might sound like a dream come true. You’re getting regular, reliable KPI reports that can be adjusted on the fly, and all the number-crunching is done for you. Thanks to software, this dream is a reality. Allow us to show you how it’s done, step-by-step.
We’ll show you the 3 stages of setting up automatic KPI reporting so you can level up your performance measuring, target-setting, and team evaluation. All of this can be achieved easily and quickly using monday work management.
1. Integrate your databases
KPIs as a metric are almost always number-based, especially as it relates to financial KPIs. Accordingly, the data from which you will create the final KPIs will be extracted from one of your internal databases. In most cases, this will be a spreadsheet. But it depends on the kind of KPIs you’re collecting based on what industry or department you’re in.
So, the first thing you need to do is create a new home for your prospective KPIs by feeding the data into a central digital location.
Ensure the software you use is friendly with third-party integrations, so the data can be extracted and re-routed fluidly and automatically, ready to be chopped up and worked out. On monday.com, you can seamlessly integrate a whole universe of third-party tools and apps for KPI monitoring and beyond. Feed data from Microsoft Excel, Salesforce, Shopify, Zapier, and plenty more into your central hub, where you can analyze all your important metrics across departments in one space.
2. Create a KPI dashboard
You can connect everything you want to measure in a central digital location that updates in real-time. You can now begin to create your ideal KPI reporting dashboard. It could be one high-level dashboard to measure overall company performance with a leading KPI or multiple individual dashboards to take a closer look at more finite performance markers.
Simply identify what you want to measure, and pick a visualization format that will let you present data in ways that make intuitive sense for your needs.
monday work management is collaborative software that gives a visual overview of where things stand at a glance. Using our Work OS, you’re equipped with a range of tools to create custom dashboards to track progress through timelines, calendars, charts, and other views for performance analysis at a glance.
3. Configure automatic report generation
Here’s the really exciting part. Your data is now intelligently connected to your central KPI dashboard, and you’ve configured it to present the right KPI or set of KPI data in the most logical, comprehensible way possible. It’s time to cook up some automations.
With automations, you can set up KPI reporting that pings out summaries of your KPI dashboards to relevant people at predetermined intervals without ever having to break out the calculator.
More than that, though, you can create automations that execute based on the results of certain KPIs. If a KPI metric suggests a sales team is lagging, send out an automatic notification updating them on performance. The possibilities are endless.
The KPI dashboard using monday.com
Using monday work management, you can set up an excellent dashboard to display your KPIs. You can create a private one to measure your performance, set one up for a small team with invite-only viewers, or display one on a screen for everyone to see using TV mode.
You can select the data for your KPI dashboard from multiple monday.com boards and filter it as required. You won’t have to mess about building excel spreadsheets of figures first, which some dashboard solutions require. You can use our widget building blocks to assemble your dashboard. There are over 15 widgets to choose from, including:
- Numbers widget: for plain ol’ mathematical figures.
- Table widget: to organize data.
- Battery widget: an innovative way of displaying progress or distribution.
- Chart widget: who doesn’t like a chart?
- Workload widget: track team member work levels.
- Countdown widget: for looming deadlines.
- Timeline widget: project management friendly.
- To-do list widget: to get stuff done.
At monday.com we don’t think dashboards are solely for displaying KPIs. The data you choose for your KPI widgets is totally up to you. You can display data from your workflow boards based on conditions and values, even down to individual data columns.
Plus, when you produce your dashboard on monday work management, the boards and widgets are connected. When one data point is updated, it reflects on other dashboard elements that depend on it.
monday.com: KPI reporting for duty
Love them or hate them, KPIs are here to stay.
But they don’t have to be the administrative pain they are at present when software can easily take care of the heavy lifting on your behalf. Don’t miss out on the opportunities that a well-integrated performance dashboard, powered up by automations, can have on KPI reporting and performance measurement.
Discover more of what monday work management can do for your team.
Get started