Does your staff know what it takes for them to be successful? Do they know what goals they have to hit every day to be able to say they met or exceeded the mark?
There are many foundational pieces to a successful team. Building the right metrics for your team is one them.
Core Values are a great way to build your team. Giving them the right tools to complete a task — or the "How" — will act like glue that bands them together and guides them to achieve their goal.
But what is that goal exactly?
If you don’t set goals and expectations for your team, you can’t be disappointed when they don’t reach them. Giving someone a goal is like giving them a destination; instead of just telling them to run, you’re telling them to run to Building A that is a mile away. With the new measurable, you can set a bar for success and create indicators that allow you and your childcare team to support a staff member if they're struggling to reach their goal.
KPIs and SMART Goals are important for any organization. Before you start throwing around those numbers like you’re a math genius in A Beautiful Mind, it’s important to determine why those numbers are valuable to you and your team. Don’t set "Vanity" metrics, which only look good at face value, but aim to set metrics that drive purpose to your organization and your team.
I know this sounds a little fluffy, but hear me out. Say you have a Facebook page for your childcare center and you’re trying to measure the effectiveness of the page. Looking solely at the number of fans could seem like a good idea, but Facebook fans in themselves are really only a vanity metric. It’s what those fans do that’s important.
Instead, look at your engagement rate using Facebook Insights. This rate includes shares on posts, comments, link clicks, etc. But without Facebook Insights, as the page owner for the childcare center, you should be looking at what the fans are doing that's actually meaningful to your business. Are they...
- Registering for an event you're hosting?
- Sharing your posts or commenting on them?
- Clicking from your Facebook page to your website?
You could have more than 1 million fans, but the page is useless if none of them do anything to contribute to the purpose of your business. For example, use Facebook to design high-converting childcare ads. Make parents want to click the link in your ads (or fill out an Instant Form by using Facebook Lead Ads!)
So before you and your staff rush to create a bunch of new marketing initiatives, ask yourself what the purpose is? If you’re having trouble, use your core values as a filter. Your purpose as a center could be to provide the best care to children, establish yourself as the premier childcare center in your community or even be the trusted brand among parents in your area. Whatever your company’s purpose, use that as a beacon to build your metrics around.
Here at ChildCareCRM, we use our core values as a filter for our own metrics:
- Are we going Above and Beyond?
- Are we working as Team?
- Are we Innovative?
- Are we providing Quality and Value?
- Are we creating Growth and Opportunity?
Using those as the tools to direct us, we’re able to set metrics that help our teams be successful and monitor our statuses along the way. Giving our teams a goal based on common values and purpose that are understood by everyone creates continuity and momentum as we work together.
So remember, don’t just set vanity metrics or leave your team hanging without expectations. Use these steps to send yourself in the right direction to create purposeful metrics:
- Ensure that you and your team know your organization’s purpose. If everyone has a different definition of what this is, it’s the equivalent of kittens running in multiple directions.
- Make sure your team knows what your Core Values are and what they mean to your childcare business. (For more information, check out our blog on Core Values!)
- Pretend the Core Values are tools to help you build a house (your purpose), and ask yourself and your team how this will pan out.
- Take a look at the activities you described above and ask what you need to track to give you the best depiction on whether the activity was actually successful.
Vanity metrics may look good, but — like vanity — they’re shallow. Be purposeful in building metrics around your team and marketing activities. Remember, you can't manage what you can't measure and if you can't measure the road to success, how do you even know you're on it?
For more information on industry best practices and advice from industry experts, check out our blog! If you’re curious about how ChildCareCRM can be implemented into your organization or would like more information, schedule a demo.
