3 Strategies to Boost Workshop Success in a Challenging Business Environment – Part 3

Welcome to the Part Three of the ‘3 Strategies to Boost Workshop Success in a Challenging Business Environment’. In part one part one we spoke about retention as the first strategy.  In part two part two we looked at how training alone is not enough anymore. So here is the final strategy to help you boost your workshop success.

3. Have Everyone Measuring What Matters, Intelligently!

This may sound a bit odd, but there are four key points here to consider here – what to measure, who measures, why you’re measuring, and how things get measured. So, let look at these:

1. What to Measure?

In order to measure what matters you need to firstly have a target or ‘key performance indicator/s’. These (usually more than one) must be something that are a true and real measure of success. As the adage goes, ‘what gets measured, gets managed’. Measuring the right things matters a lot!

Secondly you need to know what produces or causes those KPI’s to increase or decrease – the critical driver/s – and measure them too. That way you can see cause (critical driver/s) and the effect (KPI’s), not just the effect.

2. Who should be measuring?

Who? Absolutely Everybody! Everyone should be measuring things that matter – from your technicians, foreman/controller and service advisors, to your carwash person and your warranty or customer person (if you have one). Why? Because everyone contributes to the success of the workshop, all the parts make up the whole.  This leads us the point 3:

3.Why you need to measure?

The reasons why you measure are critical for this to succeed. They need to be authentic and clear to your staff from the beginning. We believe the only 2 reasons to measure are for clarity and for recognition. These reasons must be sacred – untouchable and unchangeable. Let me explain.

Firstly clarity – if any part isn’t measured how can you and your team see what is actually happening in all areas of the business? How can you and the team possibly know if they’re contributing effectively? Or identify and remove any roadblocks to people’s performance? With clarity comes insight, with uncertainty comes guesswork – only one of these is useful.

Secondly Recognition – your people want to perform and do well. Measuring shows them that they do make a difference, and allows them to be proud of their results. Just as importantly it allows you to recognize them for their efforts – in big or small ways.

Be warned – If you break these two rules for measuring and use the results to put the ‘heavy’ on them*, manipulate their targets, beat them with the numbers if the numbers are poor, or cause them to compete against each other you do so at your own peril – Doing this will cause your staff to flee your business so quick they’ll break land speed records leaving! (*Please note: there is difference here between managing underperformance and manipulating staff. We’ll address that in another article)

4.How to measure?

As the song says, ‘..it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it… and tht’s what get’s results!’. The same goes with measuring. Measuring needs to be done intelligently. When I say intelligently, I mean measuring what matters, accurately, visibly and validly. Why? So that the individual who can influence a metric can both track and adjust their performance, and see the measure change.

In closing, there are lots of metrics that can be measured in a workshop, but not all of them make a difference. Further, not everyone in the workshop is measuring and they should be. Lastly if everyone doesn’t understand why they are measuring or they aren’t measuring intelligently, they stop paying attention to the measure and give up and leave, or worse give up and stay!

Here is the bottom line about the three strategies to boost your workshop success.

Ultimately every workshop has a ‘people capacity’. Put simply, your people capacity is the sum of the individual capacities of the people in your service area. Each individual’s capacity (capacity to perform to a standard) is made up of their Attitude, Ability and their Experience.

If any of these areas are lacking – they have a poor attitude, they have limited experience (insight) in certain areas, or simply don’t have the (ability) skills or knowledge they need, then the workshop’s success will suffer – as will the profitability.

Anything you can do to develop your people’s capacity will always add value for the business. These three elements – improving retention, migrating to coaching and having everyone intelligently measuring what matters, are three sure ways improve your ‘People Capacity’ and boost the success of your workshop.

Thanks for following this series. We really hope that it was useful and would love to connect with your or collaborate with you and your team and help you develop and implement any of the ideas here. Connect with us Here

Solutions Culture Team