Becoming a Better Supervisor: Part 4 (Set a Standard of Excellence)

Set a Standard of Excellence for Your Business

If you want your standard of excellence to speak for itself to your customers and clients, your employees must understand it through and through. This includes everything that is done internally, no matter if it is answering a phone call, producing a product or the overall expected financial performance.

Standards that Must be Clearly Defined to your Employees

• Exceeding excellence
• Meeting excellence
• Not meeting excellence

As a supervisor, you must let your employees know where they are at when it comes to meeting expectations so they are not surprised by their reviews. You also need to be objective in your evaluations.

Where to Focus to Set Standards of Excellence

In order for your business to survive and be prosperous, you must compete with other businesses with your standards. When you do not define your standards, they will not be achieved and your business will never thrive.

Setting standards also creates motivation for people to strive and reach those specific standards. Creating a culture of excellence is key. A culture of mediocrity will not succeed. Setting standards is the best start to drive performance.

How to Set Standards of Excellence

Areas where businesses must excel are: exceeding shareholder and customer expectations, to be an employer your community loves, to do your part for the environment as a company, be a good corporate citizen, and measure strategies that drive actions to accomplish goals.

I highly suggest that all standards of excellence simply begin with defining what the standard is in all critical areas of the business. You also need to communicate it to every person in the company.

For example, The Balance Score Card or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are used as critical measurements to measure process’ outputs. If the standards are met, the overall objectives of the corporation will be achieved.

Steps to Follow When Setting Standards of Excellence

• Records of profit and loss that define key performance expectations
• Balance sheet expectations, i.e. cash flow, return on equity, risk ratios, etc.
• Productivity measures at all levels
• Measurements on employee engagements
• Safety standards
• Regulation compliance
• Customer service
• Marketing metrics

CONCLUSION

When a company is ranking its employees where they are meeting or exceeding standards, that rating must be present in the ranking of the overall company. If not, something is wrong.

A standard of excellence must begin at the ground level where the value of the company is created. Leadership must also define, and show in their actions, company standards. They must also have clear communication of those standards with employees, as well as the reason why those standards are important. It will show throughout the team.

There must also be a feedback system in place to measure performance. Employees can track their own standards of excellence this way.

Every person in the company has to be aligned towards the goals and performance standards. Each person must know what he or she must do to help the company excel.