It’s clear that using key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess team performance is a good idea.
KPIs are the scorecard of your business. A few carefully chosen metrics can give you meaningful insights, can help you motivate teams, and make better decisions.
KPIs can be extra valuable too, especially when you display them on a digital dashboard for all to see. Having an analytical dashboard on display can replace your weekly PowerPoint presentation because the information that managers need to lead will always be available.
This article gives you a quick low-down on KPIs, the sort of data you should choose for them, and how you can display them on an invaluable KPI dashboard using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud.
The skinny on KPIs
Numeric values are the best source for a KPI metric. Numbers are easy to display in a meaningful way, are not subjective, and make it easy to compare time periods.
It’s also beneficial to choose key metrics that you can affect with your own efforts. There’s little value in marking your team’s performance with a KPI derived from external factors which isn’t related to your department’s strategic goals.
For example, a customer support team shouldn’t use the number of product defect tickets they receive as a KPI. Sure, they will want to record the figure, but this is not the right KPI for them. It belongs to the manufacturing team, not customer support.
Draw up your KPIs using the SMART framework. This means your KPIs should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
The KPIs chosen by the decision makers should result from a brainstorming session, further discussion, and agreement from all stakeholders.
You can track performance with multiple KPIs that are a mix of high-level and low-level data points. A high-level KPI might be your monthly sales totals, a low-level one being the daily tasks completed by your team.
Just because something is measurable by numbers doesn’t automatically make it useful ― you should carefully choose your KPIs.
For example, an IT department that wants to measure productivity may choose lines of code written for a KPI.
At first look, it makes sense as a business goal ― more lines of code means a greater output of work.
But, an IT team striving to hit a KPI for the number of lines of code written can produce bloated, inefficient coding rather than the level required for optimal software performance.
Finally, it’s best if you can collect the data needed for a KPI automatically. Inevitably, a KPI that requires someone to assemble data manually may result in the task taking second place behind the demands of day-to-day ‘real work.’
Fortunately, if you use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can automate your KPI data collection and display them on an attractive digital dashboard.
The KPI dashboard using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
Using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can set up an excellent dashboard to display your KPIs.
You can create a private one to measure your performance, set one up for a small team with invite-only viewers, or display one on a screen for everyone to see using TV mode.
You can select the data for your KPI dashboard from multiple staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud boards and filter it as required. You won’t have to mess about building excel spreadsheets of figures first, which some dashboard solutions require.
You can use our widget building blocks to assemble your dashboard. There are over 15 widgets to choose from, including:
- Numbers widget: for plain ol’ mathematical figures.
- Table widget: to organize data.
- Battery widget: an innovative way of displaying progress or distribution.
- Chart widget: who doesn’t like a chart?
- Workload widget: track team member work levels.
- Countdown widget: for looming deadlines.
- Timeline widget: project management friendly.
- To-do list widget: to get stuff done.
At staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud we don’t think dashboards are solely for displaying KPIs. Make your dashboards more relevant using widgets for things like music playlists, YouTube videos, or inspiring quotes of the day.
The data you choose for your KPI widgets is totally up to you. You can display data from your workflow boards based on conditions and values, even down to individual data columns.
Plus, when you produce your dashboard on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, the boards and widgets are connected. When one data point is updated, it reflects on other dashboard elements that depend on it.
If you choose to create your KPI dashboard using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you’ll create an effective team management resource that can inspire and motivate both you and your team.
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The staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud dashboard widgets
Let’s take a look at how you might put a dashboard together on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud with a few real-world examples, and highlight some of the available dashboard widgets.
The marketing KPI dashboard
Your marketing department provides a perfect illustration for the value of a team dashboard.
You can benchmark performance by monitoring KPIs that track the kinds of activity you know will ultimately lead to sales.
Typical marketing team KPIs are:
- Lead generation
- Website traffic
- Social media reach and engagement
- Email open rates and list subscriber count
- Web traffic to lead ratios
- Customer acquisition costs
Here’s a sample marketing team KPI dashboard, this time displayed in dark mode ― you get both options on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud.
The widgets used in this dashboard are:
The chart widget: the chart widget provides a useful way to display meaningful analytics from your workflow. A single chart can use several different data sources.
For example, if you have a New York office and a London office, you could take the same metric from a column on each team’s daily management board and display it as a pie chart on your dashboard to compare performance.
The battery widget: this is a novel way to see project progress or the distribution of items across one or several boards. The widget groups items by status and displays them in the style of a battery. The battery widget allows you to see progress with a simple glance.
The board update widget: communication is vital for any team, so use the board update widget to show the latest team comments in a real-time stream. This widget provides a marketing team with a public space to celebrate wins.
The sales KPI dashboard
The sales team is another department that can benefit from a KPI dashboard.
For decades sales departments have put running totals on a manual sales dashboard to incentivize performance. You can do it for your team with an automated digital dashboard.Apart from the usual daily, weekly, and monthly running totals, other sales KPIs that provide performance insight are:
- Average sale values
- Sales by representative
- Annual recurring revenue
- Customer lifetime value
- Average profit values
Sales teams are usually very number oriented, so your sales KPI dashboard will likely have plenty of charts and numbers. Here’s what it could look like.
This dashboard uses the numbers widget, which can show the data for any numerical column in one of your staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud boards. Remember, you can use a formula column first to manipulate numerical data before you display it on a KPI dashboard.
This dashboard also uses the chart widget and illustrates the different ways you can present your data. On the left, you can see the sales closed by individual Reps for the current month. On the right, a breakdown of 3 months of Annual Recurring Revenue.
The ARR chart on the right draws in data from 3 separate boards, filtered only to show the data needed for the chart. Additionally, you can represent goals on a chart by adding a benchmark line in the widget configuration window.
The customer support dashboard
Your customer support team’s workload has several valuable KPIs worth monitoring, which provide insight into their performance.
Incoming support tickets, resolved customer queries, and CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores are valuable data points for benchmarking operations.
Your customer support dashboard may need to draw information from different platforms, but staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud has no problem handling this.
Here’s a sample customer support dashboard that draws through data from the platform Zendesk using a purpose-built integration.
This customer support dashboard uses the number widget to show an average CSAT score, with the calculation managed by staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud. As CSAT surveys come in, the average score will change automatically.
This dashboard also uses filtered data that displays the categories and tag volumes for current support tickets.
The ring chart shows the overall distribution of ticket categories. The bar chart shows counts of tickets per tag and has a KPI benchmark line suggesting when certain problems are running higher than usual.
The Llama farm widget is a fun way to show progress on a staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud board. In this example, it displays which of the support tickets are resolved, being worked on, or stuck. The Llamas are animated and strut around the farm while also giving your team a way to verify progress with a single glance.
Conclusion
KPIs are an essential method of keeping score for team performance. KPIs become even more valuable when displayed on a digital dashboard for everyone to see.
Using staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, it’s never been easier to create a KPI dashboard that updates automatically as your work gets done on multiple team boards.
We’ve only just scratched the surface here on the available widgets you can use in your dashboard.
To find out about more widgets for displaying your KPI data on a dashboard, head over to our dashboard page or sign up for a free 2-week trial and test them out for yourself.
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