10 Ways to Get Employees Focused On the Bottom Line

“Your employees want to contribute to the bottom line, but no one in the higher levels of management is telling them what, specifically, they need to do to achieve that,” say David Giannetto and Anthony Zecca, co-authors of “The Performance Power Grid: The Proven Method to Create and Sustain Superior Organizational Performance” (Wiley, 2006). “They can’t meet organizational goals because they’re too busy fighting fires that arise during the workday. Their focus changes daily. Employees need a clear, practical way to understand exactly what they should be doing … every hour of every day.”

What companies really need, according to Giannetto and Zecca, is a methodology that creates long-term, sustainable, superior organizational performance by closing the gap between strategy and execution, properly focusing employee action, and giving them the information they need to make better, timelier decisions. The Performance Power Grid transforms individual employee actions into a unified effort in which everything everyone does is focused on driving the performance of the entire organization.

Here are ten ways the Performance Power Grid can help you get your employees focused on those areas that truly matter — areas that will improve your financials in 2007:

Streamline your processes. Obviously, something is going on at your organization that’s preventing you from reaching the success you and your employees are striving for. It’s likely that the core of your problems rest in your processes themselves. Are your employees hindered by unnecessary paperwork? Do they have to go to upper-management to ask permission to do things they could easily handle themselves? These are all problems in your processes themselves, and all they do is waste employees’ time and the company’s money. “The Power Grid forces you to take a look at these pointless and time-consuming processes,” says Giannetto. “It will help you determine your power drivers, those things that truly drive the success of your company. When you know what they are, you can easily eliminate the unnecessary steps that have gradually built up in your processes. Your employees will appreciate the extra time they have available to focus on more important tasks.”