How does one drive senior leaderships visibility of the key business operations?

  • 6 February 2023
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Something to think about on a lovely Monday: how does one drive senior leaderships visibility of the key business operations?

 

Keen to hear different thoughts on this...


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Hi @catson I just stumbled upon this and found this question pretty great 😃!

 

There are some samples I can think of and intersted to see what others may have suggested. 

  1. encouraging or even mandating your leadership team to complete a number of engagement activities regularly.
  2. facilitating leadership talks 

I thought these might be helpful since it allows those in leadership to see how the work is being conducted. It also helps create a space where the whole team can freely discuss, improve, or even contribute the operations as a whole

 

Userlevel 3
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Great conversation happening here, everyone!

I’ve converted this from a question to a discussion, so there won’t have to be a “best answer” to close the post. And the title has been updated as well so it’s members can find the post more easily.

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Hi @catson ,

We have a few different strategies:

  1. The obvious one - dashboards
    1. This helps us to give senior leadership remote, high level visibility of what is happening on site. For us it is things like:
      1. Number of vessels serviced, tonnes of cargo moved, hours worked, number of observations, number of incidents, counts of damage, out of service hours, dock level etc
      2. We now also include the results from SafetyCulture inspections, so even our Exec are made aware of failed responses and non-conformances. Having a leaderboard of the lowest scoring areas really helps to focus where it matters.
  2. The intranet. This lets us share images, news and stories from around the business. This is a great way to show the people that are office based what is happening out in the field, and what some of their colleagues get up to on a daily basis.
    1. We will include things like: record beating discharge time on vessel X, new initiative in department Y, behind the scenes look at operating piece of equipment Z

But nothing really beats getting them out on site. For that we have:

  1. Visible Felt Leadership Tours. Every member of senior leadership has to carry out at least two of these a month. There is no checklist or form for this, it is more about having open and honest conversations with front line staff. The only thing we track is that a tour was conducted.
    1. We have an excellent reporting system for this where if one of your line reports has not reached the target of 2 in that month, you flag up as red, as does your line manager - all the way up to the Exec. Believe me, nobody wants to be responsible for that little red box.
  2. Site Inspections. This is where SafetyCulture comes in. We have a series templates for different types of operations that forces senior leadership to actually walk the site and check things are as they should be. This was a bit of an eye opener when managers from other areas inspect welfare facilities for other teams and find them to be inadequate. Things improved very rapidly once these inspections became the norm.
    1. One of the best features of SafetyCulture is the ability to add Instructions. We use this field to specify what should actually be in place for every check. There are lots of requirements that most people dont know. ‘Are welfare facilities adequate?’ is pretty subjective, but when there is some extra detail telling you exactly what is required then it is hard to go wrong.