Here’s something I probably shouldn’t say out loud as the CEO of a company that prioritises and promotes visibility and data: I don’t fully trust dashboards anymore. Sure, the data is usually right… but the confidence we take from it worries me.
A dashboard will tell you engagement is sitting at 62%, but it won’t tell you that this number includes a warehouse team that’s stopped asking questions altogether because they’ve learned nobody answers them in time to matter anyway. That distinction is essential, and I’ve never seen a chart that captures it.
This is a slightly awkward thing to admit, running a company that builds frontline communication platforms, since we essentially sell visibility and data for a living. And yet the most useful hour I’ve spent in the last year involved standing on a potential client’s factory floor, watching how information actually moved between people.
What I saw
I watched a supervisor field the same question three separate times in an hour from three different people, because the answer had only ever been given verbally in a handover meeting that didn’t include everyone. That system relies on information being repeated correctly, person to person, until it reaches everyone who needs it. In my experience, that’s extremely unlikely.
Then there was the moment that really got me thinking. I asked employees how concerns typically made it back to head office, and the answer was always some version of “I mention it to my manager.” Nobody could tell me what happened after that. There was no channel, no record, just a hope that the message would keep travelling upward the same way it had travelled down.
Why the dashboard misses this
None of what I saw would show up cleanly in a report, because nobody is tallying how many times employees ask the same question, or how many concerns go unexpressed. Relying on one long-serving colleague to know things nobody else does seldom comes up in a survey either, mostly because nobody thinks of it as a problem. It’s just how the floor has always worked.
This is where I think a lot of leaders go wrong: we assume that if something were seriously broken, then the numbers would eventually catch it. The thing is, digital exclusion doesn’t usually announce itself as an outage. It hides on the floor in plain sight, and if you’re there for even as little as an hour, you pretty much can’t miss it.
What I’d suggest
I’m hesitant to dress this up as a framework, because I don’t think it needs one. Go and watch. Pick a site, a shift, a team (it hardly matters which) and spend an hour observing what people really do when they need information and don’t immediately have it, without trying to fix anything or ask leading questions along the way.
Pay attention to what gets asked more than once, since that’s usually where a real problem is hiding. Notice what people reach for when the official system doesn’t answer fast enough, because nine times out of 10, that’s your real communication channel… the unofficial one people trust more than the one you created for them.
While you’re at it, try to resist the urge to explain anything away. I caught myself doing this constantly at first, telling myself a particular site was unusual, an outlier, a one-off, when it almost certainly wasn’t. Usually, it was just the first place that I happened to look.
This is a genuinely humbling exercise for anyone running a company like mine. Creating a solution is easy. Standing on a factory floor and watching, in real time, how far the crack still runs between what we’ve built and what people actually do each day, takes something else entirely. But in the end, I’d rather know than see only what I want to see.
Spend the hour. The dashboard will still be there when you get back; it just won’t be the only thing telling you what’s true.