The CEO Institute states that leadership is the major factor that makes everything work together seamlessly. However, leadership skills are not sufficient if you are making the wrong decisions because of wrong or outdated information.
To effectively manage your business and teams, you want dashboards designed to give you great insights. When paired with great leaders in your midst, your business becomes a force to be reckoned with. Here are 6 reasons you need dashboards to help you do just that.
1. Saving Time and Energy
Money can always be earned, but you can’t earn more time. Time is the most precious resource, and that is why all business owners must guard that carefully. Time wasted at the meeting is gone, forever.
Dashboards like the ones here (link to showcase) help to present all the information you need at one glance. This means that you can see and understand all the things which are most important to you. With dashboards we build, we ensure that the data source is always loaded consistently. This helps to ensure that the information you are seeing is always accurate. No more manual tabulation of reports and no more compilation errors.
This means that you can spend less time at meetings and make decision faster because you are confident of the report. This is biggest win for any business because you can reinvest that time, which you can never earn back, into other areas.
2. Ease of Access
Ever tried looking for information only to get it a few weeks later? According to a study by McKinsey, close to 20% of an employee's time could be spent on searching and gathering information.
Imagine all the missed opportunities while waiting for the information. When you have all your dashboards in one centralised portal, you can easily find what you need without having to bother your colleagues.
Across different departments, the information can also be shared. Sensitive data may be restricted through permissions. One may also pick the dashboard of interest to be added to their own personalised dashboard. This means that they only pick the information which is important to them. For example, the marketing department might want to be kept abreast of the sales team’s performance and be focused on that. The ease of access can enable better collaboration across teams.
As Power BI dashboards are available on mobile, you can access them anytime and anywhere. By having ready access to what you need, it is easier to guide your team and make informed decisions.
3. Get Alerts Early
When there is a problem, you want to know it. It’s just like a fire alarm going off when there’s a fire. You want to take action immediately and prevent the house from burning down. The alert function in Power BI dashboards provides you notifications like when the marketing ad spend has been exceeded. This could have happen for various reasons, but now your team can quickly identify the issue and rectify it.
We can also use it for positive encouragement. For example, when your sales team hits a specific target, it can notify the manager through the alert and they can promptly congratulate the team. This helps them to stay on top of what’s going on and lead the team more effectively.
4. Insights
Business dashboards when designed properly can provide great insights. Proper grouping of information helps one to understand key factors resulting in the figures they see.
For example, a particular salesperson may have been outstanding sales performance for certain products and specific markets. Dashboards present that information clearly, and you can better correlate the impact and results. This helps you to develop new strategies for sales and put your team’s strength to better use.
5. Ensure Consistency
Dashboards can enable consistent communication across your organisation. When everyone is looking at the same numbers on the dashboard, we keep the teams up to date. People with the right permissions can also access the common datasets and conduct their own analysis or build their own dashboards.
It could also be a unique way your business looks at productivity numbers, or how your business likes to look at brand perception. When you have the dashboards that communicate this across the organisation, people relate to the information and overall organisation engagement increases.
For example, if you are using different emojis to represent the current brand perception, the data could come from a variety of sources and uniquely formulated. When people look at the emoji indicator, while they may not understand the variety of factors behind them, they instinctively know how well they are doing.
6. Job Satisfaction and Employee Morale
Empowering employees are a key part of any successful business. When an employee feel like a small business owner, research has shown it brings tremendous benefits to the company. When you provide them with the relevant dashboards, it equips them to make better decisions for the team and the business.
This means less micro-management and more focus on the larger strategy to outperform your competitors. When employees can see the impact they make to the business, they are more engaged. The collective effort from the collaboration can also boost morale.
Are the use of dashboards prevalent in your organisation? Do you think management of your business could be more effective with dashboards? If you still have doubts, the best way is to get started in a small way in the most important aspect of your business. This way, you can implement it in a small way in the business and see how your team responds to it. When you do that and see improvements, you will probably be eager to invest in other areas of your business.
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