Employee commitment to data matters. This is a topic that I have educated my clients on for the last 15+ years. Data can assist business leaders and employees in so many ways to make their jobs easier, but the bottom line is that you must be able to trust the data that you are using.
A few truths I have learned:
🧑💻Bad data in = bad data out – There are employees that are careless with their data entry. Company leadership must include data accuracy in their job skills and review processes.
🧱Not all data is equal. Some data is the building blocks for calculations of new data so special attention must be made to the data that is used In calculating new data.
⚓️Data can be the anchor for good decision-making, but only if the data is “good.” It happens more frequently than many executives and managers would like to admit that they have relied on “bad data” to make a decision.
ℹ️Know exactly where your data is coming from. Make sure that you have a clear understanding of the data source. This is even more critical with the advent of “AI” which may be calculating new data fields.
A recent article by the MIT Sloan School of Management states that “it is important to build a culture where all employees see data as their business, focus on capabilities, monetization, and motivating employees.
Since data is such a critical factor in decisions that will affect business outcomes, building the correct culture for data is important. Another just as important area that I am going to focus on in this article is building data capabilities. This is extremely important in small and medium-sized business where many employers do not make learning how to work with data and use the mathematical and statistical tools that help analyze the data.
Access to good data is important for growth, managing internal expectations, and managing external client expectations. Suppose a company’s data is contained in a platform that very few individuals can access to extract the needed data. In that case, the company is at an immediate disadvantage. Some questions I generally ask company leadership about their data and employee access and use are:
- How do you access data in your system? What methods do you use?
- What % of your employees know how to access the data?
- If employee access to data is less than 80%, what is your plan to increase access to data so that employees can easily access requested information?
- How skilled are your employees at using the tools provided to create reports, KPI’s, mathematical calculations and other needed business requirements?
- If you employees do not have the skills required, what is their incentive to learn new skills?
Even if employees know the basics of data extraction and manipulation, do they have a strong understanding of what the data is telling them, and are they pulling the correct data to be acted upon to make a good decision? This is when, as a decision maker, it is critical to understand how employees use the data. If you were asked the above questions about your company and its data access and use, how would you respond?
In summary, if the answers to some of the questions above are not where they need to be, it is time for your company’s leadership to increase employee access and data use quickly as well as provide feedback and coaching to those employees that are careless with data accuracy and calculations.