Staying on Track With Weekly Performance Reporting

By: Adam Luecking
July 10, 2023

Sometimes I see organizations with good intentions and data tracking systems fall off of their goals. The reason? A failure to consistently and habitually read and discuss key metrics with their team. In this article, we’ll go over some best practices for the solution to this problem: weekly performance accountability meetings.

Table of Contents:

1. Why Should I Measure Weekly Performance Metrics?
2. What Should I Include In My Weekly Performance Measures?
3. How Can I Get Started With Weekly Performance Accountability?
4. Helpful Links

1. Why Should I Measure Weekly Performance Metrics?

Staying up-to-date on your data and performance goals is a great way to ensure alignment within your team and keep your goals on track. The most important thing to do when implementing weekly performance measures is to schedule a weekly meeting to discuss everyone’s findings on their goals. In this venue, your team is asked to share their findings and briefly discuss what is working and what could be improved. We’ve already written a blog going into more depth on what this meeting should look like, but here is an outline:

• Check-In (personal and business best for the previous week)
• Weekly Scorecard Review
• Customer or Employee Headlines
• Weekly To-Do List Review (Task completion review and create new tasks for the upcoming week
• Issues/Roadblocks (and discussion to solve any)
• Updates (any other announcements)
• Summarize and Wrap-up
• Meeting Rating (every person gives one number with no explanation on a scale of 1-10)

So, what benefits will this meeting bring to you and your team? First, having this meeting provides a concrete structure for a weekly meeting, which sets expectations and allows everyone to have a regular venue to discuss their work. The setting should foster both accountability among peers as well as a sense of support when things go wrong.

Consistently updating your data findings will also create both long and short-term metrics to give you a better understanding of how well you are doing on your goals. Initially, team members will be able to see a comparison of their work to the previous week, which will allow for reflection. Once you have been consistently doing these meetings, the scope increases, allowing for insights such as whether you have improved since the previous month or even compared to previous years of the same metric.

How do we know this works? At Clear Impact, we hold these weekly meetings ourselves! At Clear Impact, we have four separate weekly meetings, one for each department. That means the Revenue Generation Team, Consultant Team, Finance Team, and Leadership Team each have specified metrics and a meeting to discuss them. Next, we’ll get into the specifics of what you should be measuring and how to get the most out of it.

2. What Should I Include In My Weekly Performance Measures?

If you are entirely new to identifying performance measures, we have a great article on the basics. Essentially, you want to make sure every measure is helping you gain a greater understanding of your work and helping you reach your goals. All performance measures generally fall into three categories:

How much did you do? (what were your activities, inputs, etc.?)
How well did you do it? (what level of quality did you put into your actions and inputs?)
Is anyone or anything better off (what was the impact of the first two measures?)

Naturally, not all of your measures will be appropriate for weekly updates. The first two from the above list are good starting points. Try to think of the weekly and daily responsibilities of your team members and simply ask them to report on them. Remember that everybody should have something to contribute. Nobody should have more than 3-4 weekly measures to report. This task should not be a huge time burden for anybody. In fact, it is completely reasonable to only ask for one or two measures from some team members.
Example Measures

To help get you started on creating measures, here are some examples of real measures we use internally at our weekly meetings:

Finance:

• Accounts receivable
• Accounts payable
• Cash on hand

Consultants:

• Hours billed
• New business generated
• % of clients actively using our services and software

Sales:

• Demo requests
• Opportunities on the deal board
• Emails sent

Marketing:

• Website visitors
• Content downloads
• Marketing qualified leads

The bottom line is that your weekly measures should reflect the activity of staff members to know they are delivering on what needs to be done to get the ultimate impact you want for the organization and customers you serve.

3. How Can I Get Started With Weekly Performance Accountability?

The first step you should take if you want to get started measuring weekly performance is to ensure that you have the right platform for reporting. A platform without the ability to track metrics over time across departments will not be sufficient to support this initiative. Here at Clear Impact, we use our Scorecard platform. Scorecard allows every member of the team to log in, report on their performance, and share with the rest of our team during the meetings.  It also allows an organization to track community indicators to which their work contributes, but also track performance measures for different time periods, including monthly, quarterly and annually.

Once you have a platform, you need to pick your performance measures and design your reporting Scorecards for your team members to use. You may want to have group or individual meetings with your team to ensure that everybody is aware of what metrics they are personally responsible for and that they feel comfortable and confident in sharing them with the team. 

Once you have set this up, you are ready to start your weekly performance accountability journey! 

4. Helpful Links

• Sign up for a custom, private demo of Clear Impact Suite here. 
• Learn more about Clear Impact Suite
• Learn more about Scorecard
• Learn more about Compyle
• Read a case study on Scorecard and RBA being used for the U.S. Department of Education
• Read more about how we improved Scorecard’s accessibility and user experience in our latest software update.
• See examples of what Scorecard Turn the Curve Action Plans look like on our website here.
• Read more about how Scorecard supports Results-Based Accountability in this article.
• Learn more about the differences between Scorecard and Compyle and how they work together here. 
• Download our free Company and Services Overview document to learn more about how we can support your RBA implementation.
• See how Clear Impact Suite supports RBA implementation across sectors in our list of case studies.