The Importance of Metrics in Business Decision Making

Yes, in order to run a successful business you must have a good product and market it well to the right target group. However, this isn’t enough, because at some point you’ll need to take your business to the next level.

Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs fail at this step, and there are several reasons for that:

• They don’t realize the importance of information
• They aren’t tracking and analyzing metrics which are relevant to their business

What Are Business Metrics?

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Simply put, business metrics are numbers which are showing you important, accurate data related to your business processes. By regularly tracking and assessing the metrics, you can determine if your efforts are moving you towards success or failure.

If you’re looking to bring your company to the next level, you must track business metrics, and make a decision based on the data you’re collecting.

Types of Business Metrics

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In general, there are two types of business metrics:

1. Operational
2. Financial

Operational metrics are related to the performance of your employees, as well as the overall efficiency of your business. They could be related to your turnaround time, production time, time it takes to respond to customer’s queries.

Financial metrics include your profitability ratios, ROIs on marketing campaigns, sales figures, etc. 

Tracking Employee Computer Activity

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Assuming most of your team works from a computer, if you want to track their performance levels, you must track employee computer activity. You can easily do this with a simple employee computer monitoring software which doesn’t have to be intrusive at all.

The best computer system monitoring software on the market will act as a project tracking software as well, so you’ll be able to check how much time your employees needed to finish every task within the project, and it will be easy to determine project profitability as well.

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How to Track Financial Metrics?

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You can track financial metrics by using billing and payment software. It’s neat because you’ll have all your incoming and outgoing payments in one place. Pair this up with a time tracking tool, and you got yourself a winner. Especially if you’re billing clients and paying employees by the hour.

Why Bother?

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Well, in order for you to make decisions that won’t hurt your business, you need to rely on data. Metrics, as well as decisions based on them, are used for improvement. Additionally, they can help you shift your focus to your most important assets.

You should use them as grounds for new financial and marketing strategies, as well as for improving relationships with your customers, distributors and employees. 

Proper metrics should be giving you answers to the following questions:

• What were your results in the past?
• What are your goals for the future?
• Is there something that should be improved?
• Which targets did you reach?
• Which targets did you miss?

It’s important to note that you communicate these metrics and targets to your team clearly. It will be much easier for your employees to shift their behaviour, and make changes during the working process so they can reach the goal. It isn’t very practical when you say “we need to reduce the number of complaints.” However, when you say “we need to reduce the number of complaints by 20% by the end of the quarter” your employees know exactly what to do to achieve this.

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Wrap Up

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Whether you have a remote or a collocated team your business benefits from tracking metrics. As we said, you can track employees with a handy monitoring tool, but for remote teams, there are remote employee software options which can help you out.

Leveraging this information can help you uncover new opportunities for improvement, and help you measure the results of your efforts.

In the end, tracking business metrics helps you establish a culture of success which will surely keep your company moving in the right direction.

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This article was originally written on May 18th, 2016 by Gina Ora. It was updated on September 26th, 2019 by Bojana Djordjevic.

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