Do you know what the biggest needle mover is for your organizational performance?
It’s the ability to make as many decisions as possible and to make them fast. This strategy doesn’t only apply to you but to all of your employees as well. In fact, employee involvement in decision making should be your company’s backbone and is key to improve work performance. Let’s face it – you can’t keep track of everything that goes on within your company.
It’s better to trust and have confidence in the people you work with. That way, you can focus on what matters most to you – without the extra stress.
As soon as you have the instinct to act on a goal, you need to take action immediately. If you don’t, your brain will kill that desire within seconds.
Sounds crazy, right?
TEDx speaker Mel Robbins wrote a book about this called The 5 Second Rule. She talks about how you can transform your work and life by being confident in the decisions you make every single day and as a result improve work performance.
All it takes is 5 seconds for you to make every decision. After 5 seconds, that’s when you’ll start to hesitate with your ideas. You wouldn’t want that, would you?
It might take time for you to practice making these decisions so quickly. But as soon as you get used to it, your business’s 1-year plan could come a lot sooner.
So if you’ve been asking yourself, “What will help us make smarter decisions?” Count 5-4-3-2-1-GO, and you’ll be happy you did.
How to improve organizational performance
1. Know Your Priorities
Before your company makes any decisions, you have to set your priorities straight.
Priorities can change all the time. What you have planned before might not work in the following months.
As a business owner, it’s your role to make sure everyone in your company understands your priorities. That also means being familiar with your vision and values too.
When everyone is on the same page, it makes optimal organizational performance possible. They will have a clear picture of what their responsibilities are to achieving goals.
One way that will help your employees make smarter decisions is by listening to them more. It’s never been more true when you hear that the art of communication is the language of leadership. If your focus is on employee involvement in decision making, you’ll get more done and this is an important way to improve work performance.
“How much time would you save if you didn’t have to make every decision? What would you do with all that extra time?”
As long as you set priorities for your company, then there would be a strategic plan to execute. Your employees will look for the right decisions to support your goals.
But if you’re unclear about what those goals are, it’s harder for them to decide what to do next. They’ll have to rely on you to make decisions for them since they want to avoid making mistakes.
If you want to see how your employees are making decisions, you can compare what they do with what you would do. If that doesn’t match, then that’s something you all still need to work on.
Even the managers in your team need to have the same thought process as yours when it comes to decision making. That way, they can reinforce their decisions to the rest of your employees.
Not everyone will make the right decisions for themselves at the beginning. It’ll take time for others to understand how to make your goals happen. So, you can always provide knowledge and resources for them to achieve faster.
2. Have a Game Plan to Improve Work Performance
Did you know that your employees can and should go beyond doing their job?
You’re not only hiring them to work for you, you’re hiring them to build on their strengths. You pay them to become the best version of themselves. That way, you can leverage their skills and talents for optimal growth.
When employees get to do what they’re skilled at, they’ll be comfortable with decisions.
Your life changes the moment you make a new, congruent, and committed decision. Click To Tweet
Since all roles in your company are different, you’ll need to come up with a game plan for every role. A plan that works for the designer might not work for the writer for example.
Your team will make smarter decisions when you avoid the one-size-fits-all approach. That means you can’t assume that every business training will help each employee.
What you need to do is match your employees’ abilities with the correct skillful work. This will help sustain organizational performance when no one is under-performing.
Even if you’ve had an employee work for you since the start of your company, there’s still a lot they might not know.
For example, if their role is to work in the warehouse, then they won’t know how to function the storefront – and vice versa. Or someone in charge of writing ads might not be skillful enough to take on sales calls too.
It’s better for each employee to stick with that one thing they’re specialized in. This will help them grow in their role and become an expert that others will look up to.
After deciding who’s good at what, you can then pair employees in teams where you see them thriving the most. It could be for content creation, project management, etc.
You can carry out employee involvement in decision making by asking these questions:
- What’s the decision?
- What information do you need?
- Are there any alternatives?
- Can you weigh the evidence?
- What actions will you need to take?
These questions will become secondhand nature to you every time you make decisions. It creates a process and less confusion when driving out actions fast. Your team will be able to track progress and make fewer mistakes and will lead to improvement in work performance.
3. Coach Employee Involvement In Decision Making
According to the International Coaching Federation, 86% of companies recouped their investment into coaching.
Employees who receive coaching could increase self-confidence, improve relationships, and develop communication skills. These are all necessary for personal development and organizational performance. It will enable your team to bring more results to the table.
Good coaches have these 5 characteristics:
- Actively listen: You listen to and understand workplace concerns.
- Answer questions: You ask and answer questions that will help your team understand and make better decisions.
- Be non-authoritative: You take on a non-authoritative approach, recognizing the success of a team effort where you work on goals together.
- Be transparent: You are transparent in all aspects with no hidden agenda or emotional attachment to situations between employees.
- Provide direction: You give direction with the proper training and tasks to move employees towards success.
With the right coaching, your company will make fewer wrong decisions. Poor decision making can cost money and time. No business owner would want that to happen.
Instead, it’s a smart choice to invest efforts into successful coaching. After all, it’s the coach who helps a great team make smart decisions. When a leader is inexperienced, it can slow down the workflow.
The only decisions you should make are the ones that impact each department of your business. The managers can decide which tasks to delegate to your employees. As for your employees, it’s up to them and their skills to complete those tasks.
If your employees need help with bigger decisions, they should reach out to the managers. That’s why it’s important for teams to collaborate and communicate solutions. It’s also easier for everyone to give and receive feedback when you’re working closer together which will lead to improved performance at work.
To become more efficient, employees should always provide the best information possible. They should consider some supportive decisions that may work first. So both managers and yourself will have fewer problems deciding what’s best for the company.
4. Ensure Your Judgement Is Good
Judging isn’t always a negative.
In any business, judgment will help make complicated structures more simple. You will gain more wisdom and experience too.
Without good judgment, you won’t be able to make the best decisions. While making a judgment, you can ask yourself these questions:
- Am I the decision-maker?
- How much time do I have to make this decision?
- Do I have all the facts?
- Who’s opinion would I want to hear from?
- How can I get better at making good judgments?
The more opportunities you provide for employees to practice, the smarter the decisions. There will be enough feedback to know how to navigate through any difficult decision.
A perfect example of this would be employees receiving feedback, guidance, and practice.
If leaders fail to guide employees, they won’t be able to improve their behaviors. They would never reflect on the mistakes they’ve made or been capable of refining solutions.
Your employees need to see what decisions will and will not align with your company’s goals and promises. This will become a big driver in the workplace.
Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson said, “One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing is to supply light and not heat.”
When you can adjust to better choices quickly, you’ll improve future judgment by a lot. Imagine how your team’s progress would look without any second guesses? Organizational behavior is essential for improving performance and commitment at work.
5. Track Ways To Make Smarter Decisions
The easiest way to make a decision is to see what’s tracked.
That means you’ll need to record what happens before and after the results. This tracking progress will increase the effectiveness of employee involvement in decision making.
If you want to improve organizational performance, you’ll need repetitive winning outcomes.
Making decisions can cause employees to procrastinate, lose self-control, and lack quality. That’s why when you take advantage of your business data, it can help you decide what to do next.
Even if some data can’t make decisions for you, it will still narrow down your choices to find the right one. You’ll feel more confident when you’re not guessing what you should do.
To measure your efforts, you can track your company’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
You’ll need to find out which metrics are important to you to help you measure the improvement in work performance.
For example, you could measure:
- Average conversion time
- Blog subscribers
- Click-through rate
- Cost per production
- Engagement rate
- Sales revenue
- Social media traffic
- Training costs
- Website visitors
- And so much more
What KPIs are important for your business?
These metrics are a huge resource for you and your team. Once you have the data laid out, it’ll be easier to make reasonable decisions for the company.
This is something Dan Lok does when he wants to run ads on his programs.
Since there are so many platforms to choose from when advertising, it’s best to focus on only a few or even one. For Dan, he tested out ads on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and more.
It seems like most of his students are finding him through Facebook. So, it would make sense to focus more on your ad spend on the platform that helps you create the most results.
Makes sense, right? Keep in mind, the fastest way to improve is to test and see what works.
6. Optimize Your Progress
After you track your progress, you need to optimize them for better organizational performance.
Every great decision-maker wants to make smarter decisions all the time. To achieve that, you’ll need to keep finding ways to do things better.
It could be as simple as redesigning your logo or as complex as developing a new website. Either way, these changes can generate more revenue for your business and improve work performance.
How?
Well, technologies and the internet world are always changing. More people are online now and new apps are available. This means you’ll have to keep up to date on what’s trending.
If you’re behind in the game, your competition might have the advantage. That’s why it’s crucial for you to keep updating your company’s processes.
There’s an innovation for almost anything. If you feel that your workflow could speed up, there’s most likely a tool that can help you.
When you can leverage the right resources, you’ll come across fewer problems in your business. And who wouldn’t want to be hands-off as much as possible?
Your team’s productivity and growth will speed up while performing at a high level. That’s what optimization can do for you when you put your focus towards it.
The ultimate goal should be for you to optimize everything – including your employees.
85% of search marketing professionals will focus more on conversion rate optimization. That means their marketing focus increases by 85%. Can you imagine what the results would be like?
It’s true that companies will have a higher chance of success by testing and optimizing more. You could add a few more zeros in your bank account.
Before you even think about running a new business, you need to optimize what you have first. Otherwise, you’re going to get side-tracked and never fix existing issues. Then, you’ll be able to carry out good habits in all aspects of the business.
7. Take Your Organizational Performance To The Next Level
Having employee involvement in decision making will take your hands off from a lot of things.
You don’t have time to hold your employees by the hand and make decisions for them.
When there are hundreds of decisions to make every day, you’ll have no choice but to trust your team. You’ll need to rely on them to help make smarter decisions for you.
Sometimes it doesn’t go the way you want and can cause long-term mistakes. This also includes the loss of time, money, and resources.
So, how can you ensure that mistakes like this won’t happen?
It’s important for you to build confidence in every employee that works with you. You’ll need to track and optimize everything in your business for better results.
The best way to go about this is to give your team the attention they need.
Once they receive the proper training and feedback, they’ll be able to help you run your business. They can make bigger decisions on the spot. Or, they’ll know to reach out to other team members for guidance. Organizational behavior is essential for improving performance and commitment in the workplace.
As long as you’re transparent and supportive, your team looks forward to honing their skills. When you help them win, they will help you win too.
If you would like to find out how to lead a team to make smarter decisions and improve work performance, Dragon 100™ might be for you.
Dragon 100™ is an advisory board designed for only 100 qualified entrepreneurs. This isn’t for everyone. It’s especially not for every business.
But, if you have what it takes to scale your business to the next level then this is the right place. Inside of Dragon 100™ you’ll surround yourself with the world’s great decision-makers.
You’ll even get to discover how to add an extra 6 or 7 figures to your business in a short period of time. With Dan Lok’s guidance, you’ll save years from figuring it all out on your own.
