Driving a High Performance Culture

#1

A high-performance culture is the starting point for any business that competes in the customer service industry. Providing systems, processes and performance management practices align your team to perform at their absolute best. In turn, this high-performance culture retains quality team members that proactively build relationships with your clients, turning them into promoters or advocates of your business. This not only reduces your lost clients but promotes growth through increased referrals.

How do you promote a high-performance team culture within your business?

#2

It’s amazing the power of connecting the why to what we do. I think one of the things that we’ve got really wrong in this industry is our KPIs and awards & recognition.

For eg, a little while ago, a property manager was named as third in the business overall. Immediately the Director saw it, she said, how can that be? That portfolio is going backwards and isn’t profitable at this point. I asked the obvious question, well what’s in the award’s criteria? We had a look at it and it was so obvious that we’d got it wrong. This sparked a whole plan around aligning our objectives to our KPIs, rewards, recognition and training.

It’s had an immediate effect with our team bringing in more new business this month (in the quietest month of the year) than they ever have in any previous month. They just didn’t really know it was their job to do new business.

@ben used to talk about this all the time - the ‘so what’ of KPIs. I didn’t really get it at first, but now question KPIs all the time.

For eg, why are arrears good at 3% (or any percentage?). What if one of those tenants were $10,000 in debt and the owner was about to lose their house? What if on another day, 3 tenants out of 100 were $10 in debt at the start of the month? Would anyone really care? We have to truly re-think what it is we’re actually trying to achieve and measure accordingly.

I really think our current KPIs are sending all the wrong messages and even great people are suffering under this.

I’ve been spruiking these old KPIs for years myself, having been ‘taught down the line’ - so me and others like me have been a huge part of the problem.

I just think if we’re sending all the wrong messages, either we’ll end up with a high performing team getting all the wrong outcomes with gusto, or you’ll end up with a revolving door with no-one with the headlights on, knowing where they’re going. Start looking for all the messages in your business that are holding your team back.

I really the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. Here’s some info around OKRs: https://felipecastro.com/en/okr/what-is-okr/

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