Why Communication Is the Key
In our modern day of digital transactions, virtual chats and remote job positions it’s more important than ever to keep communications loud, transparent, and clear. Every single misalignment, misunderstanding and punctuation error costs the companies’ time spent figuring it out, which results in delayed results and consequential loss of money.
This is why it’s so crucial to develop the right communication strategy when it comes to increasing your outsourced or in-house team’s performance. The objective becomes even more important when we talk about the data analytics team. It’s the people who collect proper data, test and optimize your website’s performance and end up directly influencing the decrease or increase of your cash flow.
Now that we established how critical it is to build effective communication between you and the web analytics team, let’s move on to the means of executing it. We will describe 3 steps that will enhance your in-between-the-team communication and will let the work process flow more constructive and effective.
Step 1 – Define Your Objective
Even though it’s common sense to want to obtain and use as many metric indicators as you can get your hands-on, it’s a bad idea to monitor them all. You can not measure every single indicator efficiently, and the best part is – you don’t have to. The truth is – you probably most likely require only a certain number of pointers that need to be monitored, leaving the rest of them unattained. The indicators being monitored can fluctuate with the growth of your business, but nevertheless, keep the total number of markers easily trackable and manageable.
Collecting all the data possible will get you overflown with information, which ends up being not required by any of your departments and being used by even fewer. So to be more efficient at communicating with your web analytics team define exactly which metrics have to be measured and which ones you want to see reported. To be clear in your objective focus on the pointers that are crucial to your business, while ignoring each and every button and link pressed, which you are able, but not necessarily have to measure.
Step 2 – Be Boldly Blunt
Any communication is a tricky task. And even more so when it comes to talking numbers, metrics and statistics. There is a great intro to a book starting with :
“Between what I want to say, what I end up saying, what I actually mean, and between what you hear, what you understand and what you end up realizing, there is a one to seven chance that we will understand each other. Yet, let’s begin.”
And this saying couldn’t be more accurate when it comes to communication in data science. To get the best out of each transaction, communicate effectively by being as clear and transparent as you can.
You can do so by following these guidelines:
- Oversharing is a bad idea. Not all information you might want to share is important to increase the data analytics team performance, so to avoid confusion limit the provided information to the amount that will contribute to achieving the said goal.
- Make sure all your communication messages contain a reference index. What it means is that each thesis must have someone responsible for the action you need the team to perform. This way each task and its performance will always be linked to the data analyst responsible for it.
- Use “The Cart Rule”. When writing a task list or an email, use only the words you could place in the cart. For example, reaching “5 000 followers in a first month” is a tangible goal, while “increasing the website traffic” cannot be measured or placed anywhere, including the said cart. Using this technic will help to avoid miscommunication between your business organization and web analytics team and will double the understanding of your messages.
- Use the Golden Management Rule – you can manage the numbers only. Use as many exact numbers as you can, including mentioning your desired KPI, amounts of leads or daily visitors who performed an action. Being specific leaves no room for underperforming and holds a web analytics team liable in case they don’t deliver the metrics you agreed on.
- Minimize the use of the modal verbs, that can make your message difficult to understand. Don’t use words like should, want,
may or could, as it doesn’t project a clear objective and leaves room for uncertainty.
Step 3 – Find The Responsible One
When the labour is critically divided, and there are more narrow specialists than ever before, it’s important to keep track of who is responsible for what. If the accountability of the whole web analytics team performance is split between multiple people, each of the members has to know exactly who his forerunners are and what their duties include, as well as monitor in whose hands will his piece of work end up being.
Once the collection data process is complete, what becomes even more important is the person who holds the end results and makes decisions based on those findings.
Make sure that the person who obtains the metric knows exactly what it means for your company and how to interpret it. He or she is the leading force, deciding if the statistics collected will actually end up benefiting and growing your company or will stay as a bunch of expensive numbers on a list.
So to make sure the wanted results are achieved, communicate your end goal and the appropriate methods of achieving it to the one responsible for making a decision on enhancing your business with the information provided. The following described three steps will allow you to convey messages much more efficiently while sparing your time, money and nerves.
