4 Ways to Make Your Staff Accountable
Is your team actually accountable, or just busy? Want to know how to get your staff accountable without micromanaging?
Let’s break down the four ways to increase accountability in your team:
1. Statistics
It’s where you measure a number or amount of something. The important thing is that it has to be a result that is valuable to your business. That’s the first thing to know.
Most of the time, when I go into businesses, there are staff running around, vaguely saying they have some KPIs, but they don’t have statistics. you have to measure statistics on a weekly or fortnightly basis, preferably weekly.
It’s not a one-time thing. You keep measuring statistics week after week, and then it’s best to graph it so you can see the trends. Is it going up, or is it going down?
So, what should you choose as a statistic? What do you measure? This can take some time to work out. You can sit down with us and work it out, or you can choose to sit down with your team and determine something that makes sense to measure and set these as your statistics.
2. Organizational Structure
Team chart, org chart, organizing board—there are lots of things you can call this. One of the most important parts of this org chart is that the organization is visually shown. I’m not just talking about putting people up in a chart. Some people try to put people up on a chart and then match the organization around to the people. This is the backward way to do this.
What you need to do is look at the functions of your organization. So, we’ve got a sales department, an accounts department, and a delivery department, and we work out the different functions and roles that go into these departments. If you don’t do this, you will absolutely always have accountability issues.
It’s really simple—a job comes in, and someone doesn’t take care of it. You ask, “Whose job was it?” and they point at each other. Why? Because it’s not clear who does what in the organization.
I’d say over 90% of small and medium businesses don’t have an org chart. Or, if you ask them, they will say, “Yes, we have an org chart!” Then you ask them where it is, and they have to search through the servers or mountains of files to find it. It’s not easily viewable, no one knows where it is, and no one is effectively using it. They say, “We did one five years ago and then we filed it.”
It should be up on the wall. People should know it, and they should know where they sit on the organizing chart—who their boss is, who their junior is, and what their relation is to all parts of the organization. This will absolutely increase accountability.
3. Role Clarity
This follows from the last point. Everyone knows you should have a job description or a role description, but let’s face it, most of these role/job descriptions are absolute rubbish. It’s the same as the team chart—you ask people for them, and they go, “Yeah, we’ve got them somewhere,” and they’re sitting somewhere on a server or in files. And you’ll find they are never used short of doing payroll or initially giving them to a new occupant of a role. That’s it. A list of one-pagers that are not specific or informative as to the role is not going to produce accountability. A useful job or role description should actually have:
- The purpose of the role
- The duties
- The outcome
- The statistics
These are just a few key points it must include.
This follows on from the last point of organizational structure because you can’t put together descriptive, useful role descriptions if you don’t have an organizational structure. If you do, you can work out the functions the organization has, how the roles relate to each other, and what each role is responsible for.
Again, it takes a little bit of work, but the amount of extra work, waste, and lack of accountability that you can avoid by getting this done is massive. You can actually add a lot of profit to your business and have a business that works really calmly but produces a lot more. As opposed to a business that is really “busy,” running around and working, but not necessarily getting that much done.
4. Basic Staff Policy
How does that achieve accountability? It implements the team agreement. After all, the business is a team. It’s a bunch of people who need to make money and achieve goals. They all come together, and they have to play together, so they can’t play together well unless there are agreements, and these agreements are the basic staff policy. No matter what size an organization is—small, medium, or large—you always need to have two key functions going on with your staff:
- Each person’s own specialized role in the company
- Their team role
If they don’t have both of those hats on, you will end up with accountability issues. Let me give you an example: You might be in a small business with 20 or 30 people. You can’t all be in a silo and say, “I am just here, and this is all I do,” in your own box.
You do need a clear delineation of who does what. However, there will be times when there is a peak load that needs to be handled. Let’s say the sales department usually takes 30 calls a day, but now, after running a promotion, it goes up to 60 calls.
Another person from an adjacent department may need to jump in and help. You can call this accountability on that person’s part. If it moves the business forward and helps the business achieve its goals, then this is a prime example of being accountable for the business.
But then, when the peak load is over, the roles are restored, and the person goes back to doing their specific role. So, the person who jumped in goes back to Accounts, and the Sales Department continues running their area. You need a basic staff policy that gives the rules of the game:
- What are the important parts of being a team member?
- What really matters?
- What do you do in this scenario?
That will breed responsibility, not only for their own role, but for the whole business.
In Summary: The 4 Ways to Make Your Staff Accountable
✅ Clear statistics
✅ Clear organizational structure
✅ Clear roles (who does what)
✅ Written basic policy that the staff know
If you can get even one in, the accountability will rise. If you can get all four in, you will see a lot more responsibility, accountability, and the staff driving the business forward.
Good luck and do well!
Be Valuable,
Oisín Grogan is the $200 Million Business Coach.
Founder of the Vwork Hiring & Team Productivity System.