Consistently average is the goal. Consistent in service, consistent in the product, consistent in the outcome, consistent in performance. Why would we want that as our focus? It’s like building a house. Why would we want to focus on being consistently average? The key is being consistent. The corporate world is surrounded by an uncertain situation that always taught businesses to improvise their plans and policies in a way that it can benefit both their organization and their consumers. We need to ensure that we’ve got perfect foundations. However, the question remains the same that what is consistency average?
What is the Consistency average indicator?
Many advocates define consistency as the indicator of the absence of change, creative flow, or variety and sustaining a process that does not keep changing. The following standardization as a process can eliminate the distinctive features or elements that allow you to stand ahead of the horde. Thus, keeping the right amount of control in this process of consistency process can benefit but making it a necessity for individuals can end up making this process filled with :
- Flawed planning or formulation
- Enforcing rigid rules and regulation
- Repetitive recurring past mistakes
- Lack of uniformity
- Lack of interest
Therefore, consistency allows you to set standards as per the business rules and pertaining business standards that can benefit both individuals and business.
How this consistency can help you in a long term?
There are a number of plus points of maintaining the right structure for consistency in work. Be it delivery of work, happy clients, convenient working structure, inculcation of creativity in employees, and many more. It should be designed in a way that you are able to provide your target service consumer’s the quality or essence they were looking for.
At times when the market is filled with competitors that are innovating every day to fulfill the hyped-up consumer expectations, it becomes more than important to speed up in the game. Being consistent even though does not mean being regular without appropriate planning. For example in retail industries, consistency needs to be maintained in terms of delivery and completion of services, handling the data chain process, keeping eye on important individuals in the chain such as suppliers, customers, and employees. If you manage to hold control over this process of standardization then this can easily allow your business to build a positive reputation in the market. Therefore, this will skyrocket your profits eventually.
How can you manage consistency?
Let us give some real-life business examples that help you understand how you can also handle this process like an expert. A basic set of questions you might wonder before hopping on the topic can be Is our HR team great at giving advice on one topic and average on another topic? Is our HR team really focused on workplace injury, and are they quite poor at injury prevention?
I was fond of visiting a surgeon frequently. Give me a consistently average surgeon every day of the week. Moreover, they were consistently doing a great job. They follows a structured and consistent rules and procedures. Not only this, they also consistently treat their team well, over the exceptional surgeon one day who is average the next. Who is exceptionally good at this thing, but isn’t the best person to go for.
Here we noticed that this business is taking consistently average as a goal and working on it consistently. So how do we achieve consistency? It’s about documenting our policies, procedures, and then having training and upskilling associated with it.
Does our sales team have a documented end-to-end sales process? Do you know what your market is? Do you know how to go to market? Do you know how many client meetings you need to get a conversion? Do you have the same templates that you send to every client? Do you have a followup strategy? Do you have a CRM? Is everything in the CRM? Are all the tools and systems and processes there have an end-to-end process from a sales perspective? Fret not, we recently worked with a client who had over 1,000 staff and who had severe and significant complex cases.
When we asked to look at their performance management procedure and training, there was none. So they had great HR managers. However, there was no consistent process for the managers to follow. There was no training for the managers. So HR management was as good as the individual HR person talking to the manager, if the manager then came to them for advice.
What we did was develop a policy and procedure for performance management. We then developed training for the managers. We then rolled this training out, and then we had consistent people management across the organization. The outcome was everyone was managed consistently. There was reduced bullying, workplace harassment. Everyone was more engaged because there’s a consistent process implemented across the organization. In a different organization, they didn’t have any annual performance coaching conversation, so no performance reviews. Depending on the skill set of the executive director depended on how engaged and competent their teams were.
Where the executive director was highly competent at engaging their teams, coaching, and mentoring them, you had a high-performing team. Where the executive director do not put efforts in coaching, mentoring, and upskilling, your team wasn’t as good and wasn’t as high performing and wasn’t as engaged. We developed a coaching conversation framework. We rolled it out across the organization.
Furthermore, we upskilled the managers to be able to have this conversation. And the end result was a consistent coaching conversation framework across the organization, with consistently trained managers who had a timeframe in which they had to have these conversations. We had a re-engaged workforce because they were having coaching conversations about how they were performing, where they wanted to be, how the manager could manage them more effectively. And the outcome was increased productivity, performance, and engagement across the organization. Now you know what are the potential points you have to work on to maintain consistency.