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After many years spent working with businesses of various sizes, we’ve begun to notice patterns around the successful use of data and analytics. Many businesses tell us they want to be “data-driven” or use analytics to achieve their goals. One aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to using analytics is the role of team culture, or business culture, in actually making use of the insights generated by analytics.

All of the effort that goes into measuring and analyzing data is wasted without a commitment to actually use the data to promote meaningful behaviors and initiatives. This is easier said than done – just like personal habits, people tend to get excited about a new tool or metric, but often stop tracking or measuring performance after a week or two.

The only way to succeed with analytics is to promote a culture that respects data, and uses data and analytics to find opportunities and chase after them. Below, we share a few ideas on how you can promote a healthy data culture within your company.

  1. Ensure dashboard metrics are tied to what is valuable to your business. It is very easy to be mired in “vanity metrics”, tracking numbers around information that ultimately has little impact on the success or failure of a business. Ensure that the metrics you are tracking are ones that are directly tied to the success of your team, division, or business. Otherwise, your dashboards might be improving even as your business starts to fail.
  2. Organize daily “standup” meetings to review dashboards. Early on during the data-driven change process, it is important to encourage your teams to check dashboards and reflect on what they mean. It is best to schedule daily (or weekly, if dashboards are not updated so often) standup meetings so the entire team can review progress around specific metrics and plan around them. Encourage team members to provide feedback on dashboards and suggest ways to improve key performance indicators.
  3. Be a role model on the use of data. The only way to encourage your team to use data and dashboards to make decisions is to start doing so yourself. Ensure that your own decisions are grounded in data, and that you refer to the numbers when promoting those decisions.
  4. Define goals in terms of what is being measured. Your goals should reflect what is being measured in the dashboards and reports, and vice versa. By holding everyone accountable for specific progress in the metrics being measured, your team members will actively track those metrics and respond to their changes. Defining goals that are not related to the dashboards themselves will mean those dashboards get ignored, as they will not have a significant impact on employees’ personal success.
  5. Celebrate when thresholds are passed. Encourage behavior change is through positive reinforcement. If you’re defining your goals in terms of metrics milestones or passing certain thresholds, make sure you celebrate those successes. Doing so publicly will encourage other team members to track their own metrics more closely, too.
  6. Promote a “continuous improvement” mindset. Once you have set goals around dashboards and are celebrating the success of those goals, begin to adopt a continuous improvement mindset: encourage your standup meetings to be ones where ideas around improving metrics are discussed, and incentivize all team members to come up with new ideas to improve metrics. Strategies that actually work can be rewarded with recognition among the team or company, or even through a monetary bonus.

Culture is one of eight themes that Canopy Labs uses to gauge the effectiveness of a business’s data strategy. If you’re interested in learning more about our Customer Data Framework, read our white paper.