In part 1 of this series of articles, I wrote about how 3 letters – FUN – are the most important thing to focus on in your business.
In part 2 of this series, I wrote about the 4 steps to take to create REAL FUN in your business.
So in this part – part 3 – I want to talk to you about how to keep track of how much fun we are having… how to measure the fun we are having in other words.
All of us business owners know that to be able to improve on something a process or a behaviour in a business (or anywhere for that matter) you need to start with measuring the outcome of the process, otherwise you are sailing blind.
There is an old saying in business: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.
The problem with a concept such as fun is that most people believe you can’t measure fun… it is intangible, like happiness and sadness and all those emotion concepts.
But You Can Measure Fun
Quite accurately as a matter of fact.
Let me explain:
As human beings we are actually able to put measurements to all kinds of fuzzy notions. For example if I were to ask you to think of a scale between 0 and 10, where the number 10 on the scale means that you are the happiest you have ever been and can even imagine being and 0 means that you are the opposite… depressed.
You would be able to give me an answer and depending on your mood and where you were and what kind of day you’ve been having and whether the hot girl you met the other day returned your text message you might say 6.
If I came back tomorrow and asked you the same question you might say 8.
Obviously these scores are not scientific numbers in the sense that being a 6 on a personal happiness scale is something a scientist can do much with, but we can be absolutely clear that when you gave an 8 on the scale after giving a 6 on the scale the day before that the 8 means you are feeling happier than you did the day before.
This is called relative scaling. Volumes are written about the process and concepts in several streams of psychology and it turns out that we can apply the concepts of relative scaling very effectively to business management.
Richard’s Weekly FUN Rating Scale
A client of mine with a graphic design business with 6 staff, let’s call him Richard, and I designed a simple a relative scaling system based on the concept of FUN in his business.
Every Friday afternoon, Richard asks his staff to give him an anonymous rating on a scale from 0 to 100 about how much FUN the week in business has been, with 100 being that the person feels the week in business has been as much FUN as it could be and 0 is that the week has been a disaster.
Richard adds his own FUN score to the weekly rating as well. And then he averages the ratings across all the numbers and comes up with a single FUN number.
Monday Morning Staff Meeting
On Monday mornings Richard has his company wide staff meeting and the team spends 15 to 20 minutes discussing why the FUN number has turned out the way it has last week and what they can do to get the number up some increments in the coming week.
I sat in on this staff meeting recently and the question was asked: “What can we do to move the “Fun number” up this coming week. A number of people suggested that what would be really good is if a big push could be made with one particular big project that was running over time. There was simply was too much stress in the office around that project at the moment.
So Richard decided to assign a couple of extra people to that project for the week, in order to get it to completion as quickly as possible.
Richard’s business is flourishing like never before and Richard credits this consistent, disciplined weekly focus on FUN as a business measurement tool as the basis for his team’s current success.
So that is how we can measure Fun and how we apply the whole idea of Fun as our primary KPI to our business.
In the fourth part of this series (June) I am going to run through a couple of examples and pull the whole thing together and get you on your way to start having some REAL FUN yourself.
Have a go…
In the mean time, I’d love you to start thinking about how to start measuring how much Fun you are having in your business… why don’t you call a staff meeting and discuss it… brainstorm it… see what people think?
You might be surprised how even a few conversations on these topics might start to introduce a little bit more fun in your business.