So the idea being, ‘Well, what is that person doing that everyone else can benefit from?’ Those specific and tangible opportunities are pretty easy to measure. The trickier ones are things where there may not be as clear a means of measurement. In other words, customer satisfaction or, in us, how happy are the museums we work with. Those are harder to measure but you still have to come up with some means of sharing best practices even if there aren’t very specific measuring tools.
For us, we’ve identified things that we acknowledge they’re imperfect. We’ll say, ‘Hey, this is not a perfect measurement, but it’s a good measurement and it’s a good enough means of keeping track so that we can at least have best practices discussions.’
An example would be how satisfied are the museums or zoos or aquariums we work with, where our stores are. How happy are they with our performance? We’ve come up with seven or eight subjective criterion and we marry them all together and we come up with something that we acknowledge is not perfect, but it at least gives us a means of talking about best practices as imperfect as it might be. You have to be a little more creative about identifying how you’re going to measure.
We just brainstorm things that we can’t easily put a number to. Sometimes you look to things that are softer. You look to feedback … and how many comments you might receive. You’re still measuring things, but you’re measuring things that are admittedly a little less objective.
Involve everyone in the conversation. Ideally, you want input from all of the stakeholders. You want input from everyone that is involved in the process because if you’re getting input from them, they’re going to be more vested and more interested in the output and getting it right and sharing the best practices.
It depends on the business and how the business is organized as to what the most effective means are, but I would always say dialogue is better than e-mailing or Web conferencing or other means of electronic communication.
We have weekly round-table discussions around best practices, so we’ll have conference calls if it’s with people that are spread out throughout the country. The communication is around, ‘Hey, here’s what we’re talking about, here’s who is doing it very well, here are some other opportunities to implement things that other people are doing very well.
The idea is that you arrive at a place where you’re talking to not just your best performer, but everyone else is building upon that. The more people that contribute to the discussion, the better off you’re going to be because you’re going to have results that are a product of everyone’s input, but also you’re going to have buy-in because everyone is going to feel like they have a vested stake in the result.
Simply communicate the end results of the discussion for good implementation. Once you hopefully get buy-in from everybody involved and once you have that, in order to successfully implement, you have to communicate clearly what the objectives are. And I would say simply.
We’ve found that simplicity is a really good thing. The more simplistic the communication can be, the better. We try to boil everything down to as few number of bullet points as possible when we’re communicating.
Then, you need to clarify what you’re measuring, what the expectations are. If everybody understands that, in most cases you may not get all the way there, but you’re going to get pretty close. <<
How to reach: Event Network Inc., (858) 488-7507 or www.eventnetwork.com
