Farm Metrics & ownership
Last week during a webinar I ran with sheep and beef farmers, one farmer asked a good question – “How do you display those metrics so they are owned by the team?”.
There are multiple things you need to do with the team to develop the metrics, collect the metrics, ensure your team understand the metrics, and get engagement and ownership of the metrics.
Develop the right Farm metrics
The first step is to ensure your team (whether it is one other person or 5 people or more) is involved in developing the right wholistic metrics for your farm business. Ask the team how they think the farm’s success would be measured? What is important to them and will tell them how well the farm, the season, the animals etc are going? What metrics can they control and track? What metrics will determine a good season. By engaging the team right from the start, they will have a better understanding of the importance of the metrics and own them. There will be metrics that the team perhaps haven’t thought of and you discuss and include these also.
Ownership of metrics
Some metrics such as weights, feed, animal health, pasture, work hours and safety will be directly relevant to your team and they should all be able to understand these and monitor them. Other data such as monthly costs are usually done by the manager but most of these are directly affected by the team so the team should get visibility of financial metrics at least monthly. This will help them to have cost and financial awareness and be able to take the necessary action to ensure costs are within budget.
Set Targets for metrics
Once your metrics are agreed, set targets for these with the team. This way the team have committed to the targets and are more likely to own them and be engaged and committed to trying to achieve these targets. We have an annual off site strategy day each year in June during our dry off period with our team. During these day we agree all of our targets for each metrics for the upcoming season. This creates complete transparency, ownership and commitment from our team. Its also a great way for the team to set themselves some good STRETCH targets so they have a challenge. A really important step.
Collect data regularly
Work out together how the data for each metric can be captured (from technology or manually) and who should be responsible for collecting this data and how often. Try to distribute the responsibility for data across the team or delegate to the team members who perhaps have strong skill sets in data and enjoy it. We have one person in our team that is responsible for capturing all the data on a weekly basis, visualising some of it on our whiteboards while inputing all of it on a excel metric sheet. This metric sheet generates weekly graphs that the same team member prints out and visually displays next to our whiteboards in the team rooms.
Data should be collected as frequently as possible to ensure the metric is relevant and so changes in metrics can be spotted as soon as possible. For example if you collect data weekly on animal weights, then any change in these weights will be seen within a week. This enables you to identify a problem very quickly and be able to put in place countermeasures quickly to fix the problem (eg animal weights) before it gets bigger and out of control. If you only collected the weight information once every 3 months, then it could be too late to do anything about it. The problem has become too large and it could require significantly more effort and cost to add weights back on. You are likely to have impacted significantly your entire season. This applies to all of your metrics including feed, costs, pasture and so on. The more frequently you collect data and monitor data, the more quickly you can react to a potential issue and resolve it.
Visualise the data
There is no point collecting data and metrics if no one sees it or monitors it. The best way to ensure your team own the data and metrics is to visualise these weekly. Agree with your team what the best way to visualise each metric is so that it is easy for everyone to understand and track how the metric is going. Along with various technological apps, importantly we use visual whiteboards in our teams rooms to track data manually and display our graphs on a weekly basis. These whiteboards are a core lean tool that helps to engage our team and ensures ownership.
Talk about the data!
Once the data is collected and visualised you need to TALK about it regularly!! It needs to be front of mind every day so that they team live and breath it. Every week our entire team gather around during team meetings and our data/ graphs is one of the key discussion points. All of our team members, even the young ones understand our data and graphs – don’t underestimate peoples’ ability. They just need to be involved, and developed. This way the entire team is across all of our data, understand and own it, and are engaged. It helps everyone to agree and understand priorities, changes or improvements needed to ensure we are achieving our targets. It also makes the team more driven and motivated to actually hit targets.