Accountability Automated: The Secret to Maximizing Team Performance

What has your company committed to getting done? What are the chances you’ll actually succeed?

In our conversations with hundreds of executives, we repeatedly hear that accountability is crucial to success. The most effective teams communicate seamlessly about their priorities and keep others informed as expectations change.

Unfortunately, even the best companies struggle to maintain processes that achieve real accountability for more than a quarter or two. When accountability subsequently deteriorates, organizations fail to execute their strategic priorities.

At Pact, we’ve built a software platform that achieves a 10x reduction in the time and energy necessary to measure and improve accountability. By automating the most challenging parts of maintaining accountability, our product has enabled sustained high performance in teams responsible for tens of millions in revenue.

As work intensity increases, communication and planning are the first things to suffer, leading to teams dropping tasks without warning resulting in gaps in plans and processes. Managers add meetings to address these issues, but pulling large parts of the team out of their regular work further reduces capacity and increases dropped balls.

What’s needed is a way to hold everyone accountable for communication and execution without reducing the team’s work capacity. Pact solves this by integrating with highly used communication channels where we seamlessly provide nudges and collect data.

We’ve found that teams often complete fewer than 25% of their tasks before the next meeting. You may think it’s crazy that a whopping 75% of commitments are left dropped, but I’ve talked to top executives and reviewed hundreds of Jira boards, and these results are consistent.

In today’s business culture, we’ve prioritized saying “yes” without putting in place the tools to ensure we can keep our promises.

Essentially, companies are wasting time planning for things that don’t get done, then repeating that process ad infinitum. Pact solves this chronic, damaging cycle. With Pact, we’ve seen users complete above 90% of their assigned tasks on average.

By making commitments more manageable for teams and more predictable for managers, Pact helps companies plan projects with full confidence that people will complete their tasks and that teams will work to a higher quality standard. This systematic accountability is critical to success.

Automating accountability is the most efficient, impactful approach to maintaining momentum and preventing dropped balls in business-critical projects, and this is where Pact excels. Here are a few examples of how Pact has made a difference.

To get deals over the line, sales departments task their representatives to follow up on signatures, schedule meetings, negotiate contracts, and everything in between. With Pact, sales leaders can track the tasks blocking deal completion in one place, monitor progress, and reduce the need for more time-wasting meetings, returning a massive chunk of their overall time every week. Opportunities tracked with Pact close 20% faster!

Cross-functional projects require many different teams to achieve a goal. When accountability is vital between teams or departments, Pact eliminates the need for multiple meetings by ensuring tasks are completed and communicated asynchronously.

New hire onboarding is an underrated source of value and revenue at most companies we talk to. It can take at least two or three weeks for new employees to settle in and start working on their first projects. Unfortunately, during this phase, people don’t always know what to do, resulting in a lot of unnecessary and costly idle time.

With Pact, you can shorten that onboarding time to just a few days by automatically creating a task for each essential step in the onboarding process. Once set up, new employees can work through the process independently, and managers can monitor their progress.

A Pact client accelerated the onboarding of 100 new hires, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars of new revenue in one month.

As we start a new year, take a moment to consider that you might already have the right team and strategy. What’s missing is the confidence that you’ll continue to execute your goals across every team, week after week, over the unpredictable months ahead.

At Pact, we’re committed to making it easy to bring that level of accountability to everything from the simplest, quickest tasks to your most ambitious goals.