The term ‘ big data ’ is a flashy buzzword that we hear a lot recently. It is being adopted & implemented by top companies worldwide, one after another, and for good reasons. When you have digital insights and data to help, you make informed decisions that lead to business success and create transparency.
Your business decisions should be supported by facts, figures, statistics, and metrics. Your instincts can only take you so far. Without data, you don’t have a tangible insight into what’s beneficial or detrimental for your business. The data-informed decision-making process will allow you to get real-time information based on KPIs, measurable goals, statistics from within the company, and key patterns & insights. This way, you will be able to see what’s working & what’s not and how you can change that.
Here comes the real question? What, as a manager, can you do to ensure that your business decisions are all backed by data and driven by its results only? Here are some of the ways that can help you make data-informed decisions:
Get A Buy-in From Senior Leadership
If your senior leadership is not using data as a decision-driving tool, forget that the rest of the company will do that. You need to encourage your leadership to embrace the data results and make informed decisions based on them. Data analytics and execution is a top-down approach. When the executive team shows support and trusts choices taken via data, only then your employees will be motivated to base their work and decisions on it.
In today’s corporate world, whoever has the highest authority takes the decision. They follow what they think is correct or believe to be right. Without inculcating data in the decision-making process of the executive team and the directors, you can’t encourage the rest of the team to do the same.
Make Data Accessible
Companies often believe that data is this big, hard-to-catch thing that would require a huge budget to be implemented. You must normalize the use of data regardless of the budget, size, and industry you work in. Every company can use data to make decisions, even the smallest ones! From social media engagement to customer interactions, website traffic, orders received, orders rejected, daily views, reviews, inventory, etc. can be used to track and test various effective strategies for company growth.
Know that every company has data; it is how you generate and use it. When you have executive team support, you can gather as much data as possible and then sit together to discuss what the numbers tell you. Based on that, take the decisions that would profit the companies and employees.
Train Your Employees
Not everyone knows how to track analytics or use those tools to find the data. When you are geared towards focusing more on data-informed decisions, it is significant that you train your whole organization in its benefits and how to use it (as per their job requirements).
When starting with big data, most companies, especially startups, feel overwhelmed because they do not have enough resources to help with the tracking and reporting. As a company and its employees, you need to embrace data rather than fear it. It is only achievable when you train your employees on the benefits and acquiring that data and then turning it into meaningful information.
Identify & Avoid Bias
When you use data, you need to trust it more than your instincts. Your biases shouldn’t cloud your judgments. Your personal feelings shouldn’t come in the way of making decisions that the data and analytics are pointing you toward. Here, it is also important to note that this data can be used to look into diversity, equity, and inclusion in your organization. This data can tell you if you are retaining diverse employees or not. Depending on what answer you get, you should accept the data and work on improving the situation. People cherry-pick the insights and ignore what’s not serving the most of the time. This should never be the case.
When implementing the importance of data in your organization, it is also significant to learn how to interpret bias and get rid of it. Data is concrete and objective. It does not manipulate and has no personal intent. Hence, keeping what you like aside, the entire company should know how to follow data without letting biases come in the way.
These were just some of the ways you, as a manager, can promote data-informed decision-making in your organization. Data never lies, and the investment you make in it always pays off. That should be enough to get you started now!
