When some of your team members aren’t performing at their best, it can cause a ripple effect that lowers both efficiency and the overall morale of your entire faculty and staff. If you are an administrator, it is likely that over the past school year you have had to speak to one or more employees about their performance in some way. The reasons for the intervention were probably obvious, for example the employee was late to work multiple days in a given week or had forgotten to send important documents to the district office. But what about the instances of poor employee performance that aren’t so obvious?
Without the right tools, it can be easy for instances of poor employee or departmental performance to go unchecked for months or even years, causing it to evolve from an isolated issue to a systemic problem that can deteriorate the health of your entire school district. To combat this, many districts across the country have chosen to implement an automation system into their schools with the ability to provide administrators powerful analytics capable of pinpointing poor employee and departmental performance early, allowing the problem to be remedied quickly and effectively using a proactive approach. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest benefits schools have seen through automation and how it has helped get their poor performing departments and employees back on track!
Communication and Collaboration
Many times, poor employee performance can be tied back to a lack of communication. This gap can be often be seen between employees or between employees and the administration. If the employee is involved in a number of processes, it is possible they may not fully understand their role in each one. It is also possible that in order to complete their job effectively they rely heavily on other employees or departments to provide them with the information they need and are having trouble keeping track of the whereabouts of all this information.
School automation systems like LINQ Forms & Workflows offer a few solutions to combat these issues. First, whenever an action step is assigned to a member of your faculty or staff that person will receive a notification to alert them of the task at hand, eliminating a large gap in communication. Secondly, all forms and documents added to the automation system have the ability for administrators to add detailed digital instructions to every step, ensuring that everyone involved in the process understands exactly what is being asked of them.
Monitor Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Monitoring KPIs for your departments and employees is critical in identifying poor performance. If you have been a part of your school district’s administrator for a while, you probably have a good idea what some of these KPIs are for your departments. Maybe you would like to closely monitor how long processes that pass through your HR department take on average to complete. Or maybe you would like to see an overview of all of the vendor contracts that have been approved by your Business Manager and how they compare to last school year and the one before that.
Without the help of a school automation it can be difficult to track your district’s most important KPIs. With a system like LINQ Forms & Workflows, however, administrators have the ability to monitor them in real time and get ahead of issues, and once they are identified, schedule a solutions-oriented meeting with the employees or departments involved about improving their performance.
Increase Line of Sight into District Processes
There are a ton of specific examples as to how an automation system can increase efficiency in your school district. The possibilities are literally endless because a system like LINQ Forms & Workflows allows administrators to tailor the tools to their specific needs. Create your own KPIs, input your unique processes, or better yet, create new ones based on the information you have uncovered over time. Once you have decided what it is you would like to track, LINQ Forms & Workflows gives administrators the ability to have a direct line of sight into each process. This allows you to answer questions such as
- has this process started yet?
- how far along is this process from beginning to end?
- who was the last person to contribute to this process and who will be the next?
- how long does this process usually take to complete?
and many, many more. The power of this technology gives you the power to pinpoint poor performance linked to a specific employee, and even more impressive the power to identify bottlenecks and large-scale inefficiencies that may be plaguing many of your departments without you even realizing it.
We’ve helped hundreds of schools across the country gain valuable insight into their departments and employees and make some pretty remarkable improvements. Schedule a demo with us today to learn how we can help you do the same for your school district.