Importance of daily routine management towards sustainable performance

One of the common phrases we use to hear in most of the discussion in the organization is daily routine management.

Let us understand the meaning of the term and its significance on sustainable performance in the organization, especially in small, emerging organization.

Some of the myths of daily routine management:

"It is all about roles and responsibility as described in the job description."

Even though daily routine management is a responsibility of all individual in the organization, it goes beyond as mentioned in the job description. From my experience with small, emerging organization, the job description is written with the mix of activities and accountability.

However , Daily routine management is nothing but how you are consistently managing your daily routines so that you ensure your organizational performance is on track against the target. 

The context is if you are not active on a daily basis, you cannot be successful in your weekly results. If you are not effective in your weekly commitments, you cannot be successful in your monthly results and so on quarterly, half-yearly and annually.

"It is required only for shopfloor people and not for management level"

Daily routine management is a management practice, and it is required for all the levels.

For instance, if you are a shop floor manager, you suppose to do some of the activities on a daily basis irrespective of your other priorities. For example, the activities like reviewing your previous day production against the target, quality issues, customer complaints, communicating with other functions through MIS or meeting forums at a fixed time are the daily routines.

If you miss it for one day or do it in ad-hoc frequency, you may have the consequences regarding losing targets. For example, if you do not review your production status on a daily basis and ensure you are matching with asking and running rate, you may have relatively less response time to catch up or to take timely counteractions.

If you do not monitor the progress on a daily basis, you don't know the reality and cannot take timely corrective action.

In fact, daily routine management is based on the P-D-C-A cycle.

Similarly as a business head, if your daily routine activities are maintaining relationship with customers and employees, reviewing the financial aspects, reviewing the strategy implementation aspects and so on and if you are consistently doing those activities on a fixed, short intervals, you may face the consequence on the performance failure in any of those critical areas.

Benefits of daily routine management across all levels

1.Improves certainty and communication among team members

2. More response time available to take corrective action in case performance slips

3. It drives organization towards performance-based culture and engagement

4. More importantly, it improves personal efficiency and effectiveness

As any habit formation, initially it would be challenging to follow disciplined, structured daily routine management, but once it is formed, the organization is capable of handling any changes from external as well as internal environment.

In my opinion, more than management processes, daily routine management is culture building towards performance!