Every industry, even every industry manager, has a set of statistics to illustrate the problem. For manufacturing managers, these figures may be inventory turnover rate, on-time delivery rate and unit cost. For marketers, it may be the growth rate, market share and sales volume of completed transactions. For the manager of the call center, it may be the time to answer the customer's phone, the number of times the customer is dissatisfied with hanging up, and the employee retention rate.
However, if an enterprise executive-whether you manage a store near a residential area or a multinational company with many products-can measure the stability of the company with these three key indicators: employee engagement, customer satisfaction and cash flow.
Although these measures can't show everything you want to know, they are similar. They can reflect the core content of the company's overall operation, including not only the present situation, but also the future situation.
The first indicator is employee engagement. Needless to say, an enterprise, whether large or small, can't achieve sustainable development if its employees are not active, don't agree with the company's mission and don't know how to achieve it. Therefore, you should conduct an anonymous employee engagement survey at least once a year. The reason why it should be done anonymously is to enable them to express their thoughts without any worries.
However, please remember that when conducting the engagement survey, we should avoid going into some common misunderstandings, for example, limiting the problem to some meaningless and trivial things, such as the food quality in the company restaurant and whether we can successfully find a parking space in the company parking lot. The most effective and telling employee engagement survey is completely different. An efficient engagement survey should investigate employees' views on the strategic direction of the company and its career development opportunities.
Of course, growth is the key to the long-term survival of enterprises, so customer satisfaction is listed as the second index to measure the company's operating conditions by most managers. Although customer satisfaction, like employee engagement, can also be measured by questionnaires, it is difficult to obtain enough core data to help you interpret the real situation of the enterprise in detail. Therefore, we should also visit some customers-not only those who are "easy to talk", but also those who are difficult to talk, customers with intermittent orders, and customers with declining orders. In addition, we should also visit those customers with whom the sales staff are unwilling to deal.
Pay attention to relevant information when visiting the above customers. Ask questions about "how to do better" and never leave the customer's office until you know whether the customer is willing to recommend your product or service to others. Although this method is a bit outrageous, it can best test customer satisfaction.
The last measure is cash flow. This indicator is very important because it will not deceive us. All other figures on the income statement, including net income, have some "moisture". They have been adjusted in the process of accounting treatment, and there are many assumptions, such as whether they can pay cash dividends to shareholders, repay debts, continue financing to accelerate the development of enterprises or comprehensively use the above methods. Generally speaking, cash flow helps to understand and control the fate of enterprises.
Undoubtedly, there are many measures that can help to judge the operating conditions of an enterprise. However, if the enterprise has no problems in employee engagement, customer satisfaction and cash flow, it can be assured that the enterprise is in a benign development period and success is close at hand.