How important is measuring activity in the workplace to your organization? Personally, I'm a big believer in the power of data to make decisions. If you monitor how you're spending your time and what tasks you are doing, you will be able to measure that against your results to see just how productive you are being as a team. What's not to love about measurement?
On the other hand, measuring your work can be costly. It takes extra time to keep track of what you're doing, and there are expenses from any additional software required to monitor that activity. What if you spend all of this time and money measuring your activity only to find out that you were just as productive as you were before you started measuring your work?
First of all, I think the beauty of keeping track of your activity is that you will eventually run into something you can improve. It may not be apparent at first but, as you build up a database of activity, you'll eventually see how you can use your measurements to steer yourself in a more productive direction. That being said, even if measuring your activity has only confirmed that what you are doing is working—isn't that in itself worth it? If you didn't measure your work, how could you possibly know whether or not you could improve?
Here's the bottom line, as my friends at Motivity like to say: what gets measured gets results. Measuring your work can help you to see what isn't working—and also what is working. But you can never know for sure unless you take the time to measure it!
David Lykken, a 43-year veteran of the mortgage industry, is president of Transformational Mortgage Solutions (TMS), a management consulting firm that provides transformative business strategies to owners and “C-Level” executives via consulting, executive coaching and various communications strategies. He is a frequent guest on FOX Business News and hosts his own weekly podcast called “Lykken On Lending” heard Monday’s at 1:00 p.m. ET at LykkenOnLending.com. David’s phone number is (512) 759-0999 and his e-mail is [email protected].
