How Data Visibility Improves Your Business Performance

Written by OGantry

Data visibility is an essential priority for every business. It’s necessary to decide how to gather, monitor, analyze, and what levels of access people have as early on in your business as possible.

Without a transparent system for managing data, you can start to see more management headaches, especially as you scale up. People will struggle to communicate effectively and have more trouble making decisions from different data sets, untimely choices, or working on it only in a crisis. Without transparent data management, you and your people won’t be making the best decisions for your business and won’t have time to look toward the future. You'll spend all your time reacting to the past.

There are three key ways to improve your data visibility and, in turn, your business.

Increase Data Transparency

The first place to start is to be transparent with your people about your data. Make all your data accessible to all employees, except personal employee information, like salaries. Allow access to financials, cash information, gross margin, net profit, revenue, etc. Set up a time to explore these with your team at least quarterly. This will allow your team to ask questions and understand what is happening in the business.

There are common fears to address about this level of transparency. You may worry that employees will be nervous about how financially stable the company is and leave or tell someone outside the company—often without understanding the whole story. There could be fear on both ends that things are bad. If business is good, people will demand raises or want to know where the money is going.

You must build communication and trust around the numbers to calm these fears from the beginning. Have meetings to discuss the financials, go into detail about where the money is going, and be transparent about profit margins vs. how much things cost. If people don’t understand these things, they will only make assumptions. The more context you can provide, the better. You owe this information to your employees because, without them, your business would not be where it is.

Integrate Employees into the Financial Plan

Another way to increase data transparency is to let your employees into the financial plan. If they don’t understand the plan, they won’t be able to help you achieve it. Employees need to know where the business wants to go, how much money is in the bank, profit shares, investments, project costs, etc. With employees keyed into the plan, they will be more invested in helping the company meet its goals. It will help inform their decisions when they understand how their choices affect the company's overall financials.

Access to business data gives employees the information they need to do their job successfully. It provides context for making decisions. Employees will feel valued, trusted, and a part of the company. They may not always get the answers they want or have the final say in what happens, but their opinions will be heard. Everyone wants to be a part of something where they are valued and heard.

Financials are the hardest to share, but they make the most significant impact on understanding the business. After integrating your employees into the financials, it will be easier to share and manage the rest of your business’s data.

Connect Your Data to a Business Goal

When deciding what data to look at and how to analyze it, connect it to a business goal. By knowing precisely what you’re looking for, you can look at only the data you need. Then, you need to develop a cadence to regularly check in with your team about where you’re at, where you want to be, and what roadblocks are on the way to getting there. If you look at projections daily or weekly, you can keep up with the plan and see if you need to pivot.

If you always know where sales, clients, projects, etc., are, you will make more informed decisions for your whole company. Keeping up with your data management also means that you aren’t inventing processes or digging up data only when you need it, likely when you are in crisis mode. Reacting only in a crisis is not the way to run your business.

As your business scales, you will already have a functional data management system. It will be a habit for your employees and a foundation for your business. You can focus on growth instead when you aren’t worried about managing your data.

Improve Organizational Performance

Company-wide data visibility has many benefits for your business and your people culture:

· Easier to scale

· Keep better track of revenue, costs, projects, clients, etc.

· Develop strong leaders

· Empower and build trust in your employees

· Proactive management: alerts to problems early

· Better decisions = better business management

· More accurate projections

Data visibility across your organization is necessary to improve communication, build trust in your data, inform better decisions, and proactively manage your business. Making your data visible will help the performance of your people and your organization by improving decision-making, response time, and trust in your system.