Why sharing dashboards on office TVs can boost business performance

Over the last decade, businesses have been employing business intelligence (BI) tools to revolutionize the way they use and learn from data, making reporting quicker, more accurate, and more thorough.

In particular, reporting through dashboards allows business leaders and employees alike to stay up to date with company performance, due to at-a-glance data visualizations that show the most important insights presented by the business’ data. This, in turn, enables instant action to be taken by business leaders to ensure future success.

More than the overall performance of the organization, dashboards can indicate the health of individual departments within the organization, such as marketing, sales, or IT, and can even be tailored to track the top priority goals of the business by displaying the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs).

However, in recent years, more than simply employing business intelligence dashboard software to keep track of business performance, enterprises have taken to displaying these dashboards on TVs and wallboards throughout their offices.

This culture of company dashboard sharing ensures that every employee is kept up to date daily with the data insights that matter, so no one is left in the dark about business performance that should be influencing their daily decisions within the company.

But why does company dashboard sharing improve business performance?

Here are six reasons why.

It keeps everyone informed so employees can better perform in their roles.

When employees have to access a company dashboard themselves to simply view visualizations, it’s significantly less likely that they’re going to view the dashboard very frequently.

Displaying your company dashboards around the office helps to keep everyone aware of business performance throughout the day, without having to rely on employees to actively search for the dashboard themselves.

Knowledge is power, and with a constantly-updated awareness of business performance, employees can make better decisions, empowered by data insights.

Moreover, those who regularly meet with clients, stakeholders, or investors are more likely to be able to communicate the latest company performance information, as indicated by the data.

Everyone is kept up to date with business performance in real time.

If an unexpected data event takes place that requires immediate action to be taken within the company, someone will notice straight away, since a company dashboard is updated in real time with the latest data, no matter where it is displayed.

This means that events can be taken care of in the moment that they occur, boosting efficiency and productivity by enabling employees to move on to other important tasks.

Company dashboard sharing makes meetings more efficient.

So much time in meetings is wasted recapping data insights in order to ensure that everyone is on the same page about departments’ performance and the success of any recently-implemented strategies.

In contrast, when you create a culture of company dashboard sharing, you can assume that everyone is up to date with the status of KPIs. Or, if you want to make certain everyone is on the same page, you can send out an email earlier in the day to remind everyone to take a glance at the nearest company dashboard before the meeting.

This way, you spend less time recapping during meetings, leaving more time for productive discussions that focus on strategies for the future rather than results of the past. If there’s little to discuss at these meetings after removing recapping from the agenda, meetings can be much shorter, allowing employees to get back to more profitable work.

Dashboard sharing boosts employee engagement and motivation.

At work, it’s common for employees to become disengaged with the job they’re doing when they don’t see the quantifiable impact that their work has.

However, when you display a company dashboard within the workspace of your employees, they’re exposed to that impact all the time, in terms of the results visualized on the dashboards.

When people can see the data-backed results of their work, they become empowered by the evidence that their work is actually having an impact and motivated to continue to deliver those results.

Dashboard sharing frees up employees’ time.

Before dashboards, employees would spend enormous amounts of time collecting data, performing statistical analysis and compiling reports – all of which can be automated by dashboard software.

By creating a culture of company dashboard sharing, these processes can occur without the need for human intervention so that employees can spend time doing more valuable and profitable work elsewhere in the company.

It prevents the disruption of workflows.

When employees and business leaders take time to search through reports for a metric they need, this often disrupts workflows and can lead to decreased productivity.

However, when critical company-level metrics are constantly displayed on TV dashboards throughout the company, workers won’t waste time searching for these metrics as they can quickly glance at the TV before returning to the task at hand.

How can you use company dashboard sharing to maximize its effectiveness?

While creating a culture of company dashboard sharing can provide a whole host of benefits to your business, ensuring you implement these dashboards in the office work environment in the right way can help you to maximize these results.

With this in mind, here are three guidelines you should follow to get the most out of your TV-mounted company dashboards.

1. Choose the right dashboard software

When choosing the best dashboard software for your business, you’ll want to consider a number of things, including customizability, graph and data filter functionalities, templates, and more.

More than this, you should make sure your dashboard software automatically updates the data visualizations on the dashboard – even when displayed on devices such as TVs – and has the capability to display different dashboards consecutively, since you’ll probably have more than one dashboard you think employees should see.

2. Ensure you’re not overloading your company dashboard.

A rule of thumb for designing dashboards, however they’re displayed, is to ensure you don’t overload them with metrics in order to show a clear overview of business performance. This is even more important when it comes to dashboards displayed on TVs throughout the company.

After all, company dashboards displayed around the offices take ‘at a glance’ to the next level, as employees will likely spend no more than a few seconds looking at the dashboard as they walk past it.

With this in mind, you’ll want to maximize retention of the most important KPIs – the ones you believe will have the most impact on employee performance.

3. Ensure the company dashboard is relevant to the audience.

Especially in a corporation with multiple fully-fledged departments, as in an enterprise, you’ll want to make sure that the company dashboard you display is specific to the people who are seeing it.

For example, if individuals in the marketing department tend to occupy a particular area of your offices, then you should make sure to display a marketing-specific dashboard in those places.

However, bear in mind that sometimes it’s a good idea to show related department-specific dashboards – such as sales – on rotation to ensure individuals get a full picture of how the business is performing, especially when performance of one department is likely to influence, and be influenced by, another aspect of the business.

So, to increase engagement and boost performance within your business, consider building a culture of company dashboard sharing by using TVs around the office to keep employees armed with the most up-to-date data, subsequently enabling you to reap the best results for your business.