Using Scoreboards to Drive Engagement

Pick a sport, any sport whatever you like to follow and then think to yourself why do I spend my time watching this sport, team or player? Why do I voluntarily spend my money on a Sky Sport subscription, a season pass to the local sports stadium or a couple of airline tickets to travel to the other side of the world? The answer, we all like to back a winner, the sports industry has long understood that using scoreboards to drive engagement with their fans is the best way to keep them hooked. Of course in this day and age of smart phones and tablets even the scoreboard has morphed from the big traditional stadium scoreboard to interactive apps that give you all the information and statistics you could possible want to keep you engaged and excited.

So if the sports industry can drive that level of engagement and encourage us to happily spend our own money in the process, why is it then that we cannot get the same level of engagement from our employees especially when we pay them to be there every day?

4 Steps To Engaging Scoreboards

1. 

   Example of a NPS scoreboard for customer feedback

   What are we measuring: Decide what should be scored within your business, if you have a clearly defined BHAG™ or Purpose that is measurable that can generate excitement at a company level. Everyone should have their own version of a scoreboard that shows there progress with their own job balance scorecard outcomes or progress on specific projects. The key is to get a balance between what is important to the business, your clients (yes you should have external facing scoreboards) and your employees.

2. Who is the scoreboard for: Identify the audience that will be receiving the information from your scoreboards and find out from them how they would like to see that information. Little point in having pretty pictures when the recipient only gets excited by numbers or vice versa.
3. Where will the information come from: Decide how you will pull the information together and how often it should be updated on your scoreboard. Where ever possible automate the flow of information to the scoreboards, if it is reliant on humans to manually update the scoreboard it will go out of date very quickly.
4. Who will take ownership of the process: Very important to have one person in the organisation accountable for driving the whole process forward. The gathering of information more often than not comes from multiple departments for the business so it really needs one person with the overall accountability to coordinate the process to create those engaging scoreboards.

Once you have those scoreboards up and running you will very quickly notice and different level of excitement and engagement from everyone within the company.