Many companies wish to improve their performance and seek strategic advice as well as marketing or organizational development strategies, and when they receive advice, opposition emerges throughout the organization and ultimately this advice remains untouched in a book. Therefore, it would be more fitting, in our opinion, to create the change by truly cooperating with company personnel and by guiding the company from within the ranks of the company employees, with the help of their existing knowledge, and to forge a bond between the managers and the employees in order to achieve targets - out of a sincere desire to participate in the improvement process.
In this article, we shall present how to induce quick and sharp improvement with the help of a set of targets conferred to managers and from them to employees. The set of targets encompasses all important company aspects and fields; targets are achieved by conferring responsibility upon the managers and by enlisting employees with their knowledge and information, and mainly with their readiness to create change and improve results.
When the company sets annual targets that are then divided into monthly targets, and monitors these targets, the company management is responsible for meeting these targets. At a monthly management meeting, there is an overview of last month’s meeting of targets. The targets are set according to company goals, and according to its priorities. The CEO sums up the targets with each one of the managers according to the annual budget (optimally, when there is no annual budget, the targets are summed up respective of goals).
The results are measured and handled regularly by subject (on a daily, weekly or only monthly level). Each manager leads the handling of targets under his/her responsibility with the help of work teams of employees in his/her dept. or division. Once a month, at the management meeting, each manager presents the steps that he/she takes and is planning to take in his/her specific field. This is the correct strategy for both small and large companies. In small companies there will be fewer targets and fewer managers, with each manager dealing with several fields at once. But whether in a small or large company, this method works and proves successful.
As soon as the company focuses on implementing the plan and each manager and employee assumes responsibility and is focused on goals, constant improvement begins, improvement that will not only not let up, but will even speed up. The monthly management meeting also focuses the company on the goals and targets that it has set for itself, and also focuses the managers and employees on achieving these goals.
On the dashboard below we present a sample follow up. You can see how the improvement process is almost consistent and uniform in all areas. In the next overview, we shall present individual examples of improvement in operational targets. In previous overviews, we presented the achieving of targets such as collecting debts and sales targets using this method (however, we did not present the entire system of the company’s targets).
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