How to Enhance Your Organization's Success With Increased Accountability

As a leader, it's crucial to implement accountability, alignment, and focus throughout your organization to foster success. Accountability, in particular, contributes to positive results by reducing the amount of time and effort spent on disruptive activities and unproductive behavior.

When you hold people accountable for their actions, you're training them to assign value to their work. Improved accountability done right can increase your team members' skills and confidence.

Check out the following five easy ways to improve the levels of accountability in your team’s work environment.

Define Accountable Behavior

Data show that 82 percent of middle and senior management admit they have limited ability to create accountability in their subordinates. Before developing a culture of accountability, it’s important to understand what it is and what you want to achieve.

The definition of accountability is taking or accepting assigned responsibility for a task or function that you have done or plan to do. Accountable behavior, therefore, requires employees to understand their roles clearly, perform to the best of their ability, and accept responsibility for the outcomes – both good and bad.

To enhance your organization's accountability, your workers must commit to these attributes.

Create SMART Goals and Measure the Results

It’s challenging to hold someone accountable for their actions – or lack thereof – if you don’t know what they were expected to achieve. Establishing clear, measurable objectives is critical to the success and growth of a company, as well as the engagement of your team.

Without achievable goals, workers may feel directionless and unsatisfied, leading to complacency and mediocre performance.

Developing SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely) goals tap into employee creativity and sets clear expectations for deliverables. When people know that their performance is visible to others, they are more likely to operate accountably.

Set Up Performance Metrics

To determine whether a goal has been achieved or not, you need to know what you’ll use to measure your performance. For example, a goal to attract new monthly revenue of $100,000 is simple to measure because you just need to look at your sales figures.

However, it’s a little more complex to measure a goal such as increased customer retention, so you need to set up performance metrics by which you can evaluate results.

Perhaps you’ll determine a customer service agent’s performance by the number of positive versus negative surveys received from consumers interacting with them. A high success rate indicates better accountability, and, whatever your baseline, implementing performance metrics across all employee positions will help encourage greater accountability.

Hold Employee Reviews

Just as you can’t establish accountability without measuring it, you can’t establish employee performance if you don’t conduct reviews. These reviews give both the company and the workers valuable feedback. They create an opportunity for employees to get recognition for work well done or to bring attention to areas requiring more attention.

Acknowledging effort and providing constructive feedback helps people realize their work is valued and understand what they can do to improve their performance even further. This helps to promote increased accountability, which enhances the organization’s success.

Use Engagement Surveys

Employee engagement surveys are critical to increasing your team’s accountability because they give workers an avenue to provide open, anonymous feedback. It’s also a chance to create two-way communication with employees and give them a direct line to your management team.

Surveys can tell you exactly how your employees feel about their work environment, the company culture, management style, and whether they feel motivated enough to accept accountability for their work. This method can also provide you with information on areas needing improvement or difficulties faced by staff that you might otherwise be unaware of.

Build an Accountable Organization

Get your employees working with you instead of against you by building an accountable culture and organization. Set an example by acknowledging your shortcomings and taking responsibility for your tasks. Create clear goals and expectations so your team knows what results they should achieve.

Address any obstacles employees encounter when they try to do their jobs. Set up and implement recognition, rewards, and consequences for the results, and support ongoing learning to help workers rise through the ranks.

With an accountable organization in place, you’ll be amply rewarded by your workers as they always put their best foot forward to deliver on their responsibilities.

Want to explore further? Have questions? Get in touch and let's set up a time to talk. Brian Tracy USA: 877.433.6225 Email Me

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