Continuing the Connection Success Map

When you read the words “traffic light system” you probably already have a pretty clear idea in your mind. But have you ever applied that idea to your business?

As a business owner, a key strategy to keep things moving forward is to apply a traffic light system. Essentially, it’s a three-part system:

Red light: Engagement is low and you need to intervene.

Yellow light: Engagement is lukewarm, but a simple follow-up might do the trick.

Greenlight: Things are running smoothly.

Now, you can probably guess what each of these lights represents. But I’m here to explain how to apply this strategy to help you measure engagement from the people around you, whether it’s for your clients, your suppliers, your team members, or anyone involved with your business.

When you consider whether or not people are engaging with you, there are a few things you can do to measure your success and keep yourself on track.

For starters, focus on measuring what matters – often this begins with engagement. Okay so how do you measure whether or not someone is engaging with you? Of course, this will vary depending on your business, but you can get a baseline from monitoring how often people interact with you and whether the way they interact with you has changed over time.

Keep an eye out for warning signs of dropping engagement, for instance, people are slow to get back to you or stop responding to your communications altogether. These are critical moments that need your attention, and whether the action you take is a simple email, a phone call, or a next-steps game plan, it’s up to you to re-engage them.

Note that it’s not just people who are sitting in the yellow or red zones that need your attention. People who you categorize as a “green light” deserve your gratitude and even praise.

Once you understand where people sit in terms of that traffic light system, it’s time to direct the traffic and come up with a plan to keep things moving.

Now that you’ve measured what matters and directed traffic, you need to manufacture a relationship and create some kind of connection to help boost motivation and re-establish that sense of trust you worked so hard to build in the first place.

The important thing to note here is that this stage of reconnection requires a two-way conversation, maybe a little give and take. It’s not a closed-ended email that’s likely only going to push them further away, instead, it might be a meeting or a coffee chat, for an employee it might even be a performance check-in where you both bring feedback to the table.

A key tip for re-engaging someone? Schedule a time for that two-way conversation to happen. Make the time for it and encourage input, feedback, and open communication.

The ultimate goal of this meeting is to make it easy for this person to get your help or support, and to understand what kind of help they need.

Now remember, not every person you sit down with is showing lowered interest in engagement, you might be sitting down with someone who you ticked off as being a “green light,” in which case, take the time to acknowledge everything that’s going well. This is the type of contact that will strengthen the relationship over time and open the floor to constructive feedback, both ways.

After each of these meetings or check-ins, be sure to log notes about what you both said and how you’re both feelings. Alongside these notes, you can then implement a system for your entire business to keep track of this success roadmap. For employees, this might be a series of performance reviews and specific targets set out for them. For clients, it might be an informal report on their overall experience, their purchases, their feedback, and so on.

Finally, we want to extend the shelf life of every solution we come up with. We don’t just want to slap bandaids on problems, and we certainly don’t want people to move from yellow to green for a short time only to fall back to yellow or worse, red.

To keep everything in the green, we need to monitor our notes and seek out any patterns. If we’re consistently seeing the same problems then we know something bigger is going wrong behind the scenes and we need to fix something. Having a storage of resources and solutions will help.

The point is, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you encounter a drop in engagement. Keeping meeting notes and tracking your client and employee’s success and performance means building a database of resources and solutions that you can apply in the future.