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Connections Online March 2011 | |
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Connections Online 4.0 Advanced Features Webinar Wednesday, March 9th at 1:30 EST Wednesday, April 13th at 1:30 EST This 30-minute training webinar highlights advanced functionality of Click here to register for April 13th Connections Online 4.0 Application Training Webinar Wednesday, March 16th at 1:30 EST Wednesday, April 20th at 1:30 EST This 60-minute training webinar dives deeper into an overall “how to use” Click here to register for April 20th Educational Webinar Past Educational Webinar Recordings For a listing of our past Educational Webinars, use this link: http://www.connectionsonline.net/news/events.aspx Training Library Click here to link to our Training Library Informational Webinar If you know someone outside of your company who may be interested in learning more about Connections Online Migration If you have not already done so, and are ready to migrate to 4.0, please contact |
Jim Cardwell’s Educational Webinar: How to Connect Employees to Improve Metric Results During our most recent Educational Webinar (Feb. 10, 2011), we discussed how to identify high-impact organization metrics, align them with your departments, and bring them to life through employee engagement. We shared some tactics for helping team members learn the fundamentals behind each metric. We also touched on how to use metrics in dialogs for maximum performance. If you missed this in-depth webinar, here’s the summary… To start, we pointed out four Key Elements to improve your metric results: · Identifying and Aligning metrics to organize departments and people · Multi-Level Dialogs bring people together · Employee Engagement produces results · Leadership at all levels keeps teams successfully on task to achieve goals Looking at the first key element, Identifying and Aligning your metrics, there are five components that align a solid metric strategy: 1. Strategy – What is the concept of the business? What are we trying to do? Alignment starts here. 2. Corporate Scorecard – Measuring the journey of the strategy. 3. Department Scorecard – Most of the work comes from the department level. What things can they measure that roll up to the bigger numbers on the corporate scorecard? 4. Department Leader’s Basic Role – Ties metrics into department leaders’ roles regarding the items they touch. 5. Individual Metrics – Things they can control, rolling up from individual to department to corporate scorecards. As an example, we provided a strategy that was developed for one of our credit union clients. First, they established the credit union’s core purpose: helping members achieve lifetime financial success. Within this context they created a five-year goal (BHAG) that served as a unifying focal point – an end zone. They then identified a strategic focus to define the major changes they needed to address to fill the gap from their current state to their desired future. Using their strategy, we built a corporate scorecard with Member, Financial, and People categories that had five to six metrics beneath each of the categories. While establishing metrics, remember to keep your numbers attainable, with a little bit of “stretch”. Don’t make it too easy. Also look at benchmark data to ensure you are performing at or above your peer group. When the corporate scorecard is developed it is important to identify who owns each of the metrics – it takes more than one department. Look at who had the biggest impact on driving the number. Who are the departments that most affect each element of the scorecard? With loan growth, for example, you would think lending would own that metric. For the most part, it does. But it can’t bring in loan growth by itself. There are other areas that impact lending such as marketing, branches, and other contacts to help deliver the word. Lending is at the center however. Then it’s time to get these departments to work together to achieve success. Another important item is to provide related links on the information that relates to the metric you are working on. This provides perspective and knowledge. To provide a way for everyone on the team to understand each metric on a scorecard, credit unions should add these four questions to help define it. 1. What does it measure? 2. Why is it important? 3. How can it improve? 4. How is it calculated? If everybody involved knows the answers to these four questions to every metric, you will have a pretty robust conversation that will make your team much more engaged. If you want wisdom from the group, people need to understand these basics so they can productively contribute to the discussion. Speaking of discussions, we have another key element: Metric Dialogs. The idea of dialogs is to set people up to win. Dialogs create perspective. They provide insight, they identify problems, they allow the story to be shared up and down the corporate ladder, and ultimately they allow success and recognition of those team members who deserve it. The power of Metric Dialogs entail: · Reinforcement · Opportunity for learning · Gaining insight · Building impact Dialogs produce Employee Engagement; they are the ideal venue for providing clarity, understanding, learning and growth. They establish a line of sight so people gain insight on what’s happening. They get the metric owners involved – which produces cross-functional problem-solving and positive performance. Recognition is also important. People are engaged if they see what they’re doing is making a difference. The last key element of effective metric management is Leadership. Leaders must conduct positive framing, to help people understand: Why are we doing this? How is this number going to help us? Leaders need to set a performance standard or a bar to encourage their people to aim higher on a consistent basis. They also need to engage people through daily attention and interactions. They use the “management by walking around” method to get out and talk to people. Effective leaders manage the team’s energy, and they keep their attention on the achievement of the company’s goals. And, lastly, leaders need to recognize successes and achievements of their teams. We hope this webinar was helpful in connecting your employees to improve your metric results for the continued success of your organization. Click here to download an archived recording of the presentation. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call us: Jim Cardwell or Karla Norwood at Cardwell – 1-800-395-1410 or info@connectionsonline.net. COL IQ – Metric Roll-ups and MS Project Connector Metric Roll-ups and Metric Linking as well as MS Project Connector are in production. The Outlook Connector is ready for beta testing. If you are already an IQ subscriber and are interested in beta testing, please contact me. This connector will sync all tasks (project, dialog follow-up, basic role and personal tasks) to your Outlook task list as well as sync Outlook calendar with dialog meeting dates and project end dates. You are able to easily mark tasks off as completed, add comments, etc. If you have not already subscribed to COL IQ, please contact Karla Norwood at 800-395-1410 or karla.norwood@connectionsonline.net 4.0 Tips of the Month Completed Tasks · Completed Project tasks on Individual pages don’t show up after 30 days from the project actual end date so please make sure you print a copy of your Individual Connection report for your records. · Completed Follow-Up tasks on Individual pages don’t show up after 30 days on the People Tab. · Completed Personal tasks on Individual pages have to be deleted by the individual, there is no time limit for them to not show up. · Tasks on the Basic Role on Individual pages have to be deleted by the individual, there is no time limit for them to not show up. If you open the basic role, you can delete them in the edit box. · In the Individual Dialog, completed tasks show up on the next dialog and do not show up on dialogs after that. Example: If we complete a task on Jan 15, it will still show up on the next dialog, Feb 15, but will not show up on the March dialog. However, that task will not show up on the Individual page under Follow Up tasks after 30 days (or Feb 15 in our example). Custom Logo in Connections Online We have the ability to replace the Connections Online logo on all of the main pages near the tabs and on all of the reports. These can be different logos to allow them to look better with the tan background of the main pages and the white background of the reports. Updated Manual We are continually updating our manuals and you can go to the link below at any time to obtain the newest manual. You can tell if you have the latest version by the date at the bottom of the page in the manual. Connections Online User Manual: http://www.connectionsonline.net/docs/user-manual4.pdf Client Care Notes To view previous Connections Online Newsletters, go to http://www.connectionsonline.net/News/Newsletters.aspx Monthly Calendar of Webinar Events Link: Go to this link and then choose Calendar of Web Events from the list: http://www.connectionsonline.net/News/Events.aspx Connections Online (440) 892-1410 or (800) 395-1410 |
March 2011 Newsletter
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