How important are names in our organization? What about numbers and metrics? The second question is easier to answer. Most companies, mine included, strive to be metrics driven. However, a recent comment from an employee suggested we just might be too metrics driven.
We cannot separate names and numbers. Our employees have names, but they also have corresponding numbers showcasing performance metrics, salaries, attendance etc. Similarly, our customers have names and corresponding numbers: annual sales, volume of sales, years doing business with us, etc. Even nonprofits know their donors’ names and size of their contributions.
As our business grows and expands, the natural progression is to become more and more data driven. You might not know all 50 employees by name and as you grow, you definitely won’t know your thousands of customers by name. It simply becomes more efficient to track our employees through their numbers on a spreadsheet. How many hours did they work, how many widgets or sales did they produce, how many errors or defects did they make? As technology improves, so does our ability to crunch data, making it easier to turn people into numbers. As humans, we love this idea because it helps make sense of productivity and people. We now have tools to distill complex things into manageable data.
Our employees should understand this need to be data driven, right? We are a business after all and need to hit the numbers. However, as we were laying out the objectives for the week, we had an employee comment, “You only care about the numbers.” What they were saying is, “I feel insignificant beyond my ability to produce. I want to feel valued, and the way you talk makes me feel less important than the number.”
Our digital age compounds our desire for significance, being seen and being valued. We tend to obsess about our stats and let them define who we are and our value as individuals and organizations.
God knows our numbers but our names matter more. Isaiah 43:1 says God calls us by name and we are His. Our names are written in the book of life (Revelation 3:5). God values individual names so much that a significant part of the Old Testament includes lists of names (Example: Nehemiah 10). On the flip side, since God knows us so intimately, he also knows the individual stats. He knows everything, from the number of hairs on our head to the number of sins we have committed. Yet, God desires to see us rather than our stats (record of sin), so he made a way through the blood of Jesus to wash our record clean.
How we run our business will be a reflection of which one we value more: names or numbers. If our goal is to become more like Jesus every day, we should strive to keep individual names (people) as our focus instead of the metrics.
How do you demonstrate to your employees and customers that they are more valuable than the numbers attached to them? As our employee’s comment above demonstrates, we still need to grow in this area and your examples can help us do that. Please leave your feedback below!
Here are a few ways we try:
- How we frame things:
revenue focus: When launching a new product or service we might see a five million dollar category where we need to capture market share. The strategy revolves around targeting those consumers and gaining a bigger slice of the pie (seeing people as the gatekeepers to the $ and a way to gain the market share).
Vs.
people focus: Seeing the five million dollar category and recognizing that there is an opportunity to serve and add value to the 100,000 individuals that make up that category (the market size shows the size of the individuals’ needs and how big the opportunity is to serve and bring value to those individuals).
- Remembering and using someone’s name whenever possible. It is a simple way to say, “You are known. You are seen. You are recognized.”
- When discussing orders within the company, we reference the person’s name, not the order number. When someone calls to place an order, don’t ask for the “customer ID number”, but their name or company name.
The more our world turns us into numbers the more we can reflect Christ simply by using names and showing people they are seen and valued. Ultimately showing them they are valued beyond any number or metric they represent but valued simply because they are God’s children, created in his image, and deeply loved by him.