Thursday, December 29, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
What Great Companies Know About Culture - Deidre H. Campbell - Harvard Business Review
What Great Companies Know About Culture - Deidre H. Campbell - Harvard Business Review
Even in this unprecedented business environment, great leaders know they should invest in their people. Those companies who are committed to a strong workplace culture tend to perform well, and now they are featured prominently in a new ranking recently released by Great Place to Work Institute. Among the top performers on the 2011 World's Best Multinational Companies list are culturally-strong technology companies such as Microsoft, NetApp, SAS, and Google.
But is there a direct correlation between employee investment and the balance sheet? As Prof. James L. Heskett wrote in his latest book The Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with "culturally unremarkable" competitors.
To better understand the ROI, my company, Burson-Marsteller, teamed up with the Great Place to Work Institute to ask senior executives from top-ranked companies about the value of a positive work environment. The survey garnered responses from 20 of the top 25 companies in the global workplace ranking. Here's what those companies do in common:
They invest more in their employees. The response came back resoundingly: It's simply good for business. Rather than cutting back or eliminating programs, 30 percent of top-ranked companies are investing more in work-life programs, such as flex-time, health benefits, and employee perks. The remaining 70 percent have held steady the level of investment.
They're upgrading. Old-fashioned benefits like health insurance, family leave, and flex time ranked only 15 percent when considering most valued HR offerings. Traditional onsite benefits, such as cafeterias, childcare, massages, and volunteer opportunities ranked a mere 5 percent when determining what benefits provide stability during economic uncertainty. Instead programs that offer the most stability, as reported by 75 percent of respondents, are those that communicate brand mission and provide career development opportunities.
They recognize that culture is critical to talent retention. When asked which elements of workplace commitment most benefit daily operations, companies ranked culture at 80 percent and recruitment/retention at 70 percent. Competitiveness, customer loyalty, innovation, and productivity — while critical to daily operations — trailed behind with each under 20 percent. In a world where competition for talent is global, star performers seek companies with values that mirror their own.
They know their audience. These companies recognize which stakeholders will watch their every move. For this audience, it's imperative to communicate the company's commitment to being a great workplace. 70 percent of respondents ranked customers as the most important external audience to understand this crucial point. 35 percent cited investors as the second most important external audience. This means that employees and senior leadership alike should ensure that the brand is understood inside and out by customers and other stakeholders. This blend is special, valuable, and demonstrates the holistic view we have of 'doing business' in the world.
Becoming a great workplace is not a transition that will happen overnight. Being a great workplace is the result of a long-term investment in their employees. As the top-ranked companies demonstrate, this kind of investment will increase productivity, improve recruitment and retention, and save costs — all positively impacting the bottom line. In challenging economic times, we are reminded that companies should not only be a great workplace because it is the right thing to do, but because it is good for business.
Using Social Networks to Improve Operations - Gary Edwards and Mike Amos - Harvard Business Review
Using Social Networks to Improve Operations - Gary Edwards and Mike Amos - Harvard Business Review
For decades the mystery shopper was the main way retailers assessed operations from a customer's point of view. By sending in a fake shopper, typically once a month, an individual store essentially was buying a dozen performance snapshots per year. Then telephone surveys began to supplement mystery shopping. Today, digital technologies are supplanting both, with online customer surveys providing an exponentially greater number of performance snapshots per day.
A well-managed loop that links customer experience feedback with recommendations on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, can boost service quality and operational performance, increase traffic and create more happy customers — people who crow about a retailer online for free, turning their friends into new customers too.
A new mini-industry has emerged using these techniques, known as "customer experience management," or CEM. Our company, Empathica — as well as a number of competitors — are providing customer feedback to operations, while partnering with "web-scraping" companies to listen to random chatter online.
Now we're turning attention to linking operations to marketing through "social CEM." The aim is not to drive online advertising impressions, but to explicitly and transparently drive the behavior of customers, front line service staff and retail managers. The aim is to create a true dialogue, not simply a listening post for customer kudos and complaints. And by doing so, this loop can drive meaningful operations and customer satisfaction gains.
An example: At Debenhams, a major international department store chain based in London, a customer complained through an online survey about a poor meal they received at the store's restaurant. "Ordered turkey dinner. Very dried out. Overcooked vegetables in greasy, cold gravy." The store manager called the customer that night, apologized, and sent a coupon for two free meals. The customer was invited to post their happiness with the problem's resolution on Facebook, and did. The store manager made sure the kitchen turned out better turkey dinners. The result: a satisfied customer, better kitchen operations, and free social network advertising. Debenham's effectively took what would have been a one-off customer experience problem and turned that customer into an Debenham's advocate online and improved its operations to reduce the possibility of future disgruntled customers.
A social network feedback loop starts with information gleaned from customer surveys conducted online. Those survey-takers are then linked directly to social networks like Facebook through a link on the survey.
So how many customers will actually bother to move from surveys to socializing their experience? We have some data that suggests a healthy amount. We conducted 25 million surveys last year; more than 80 percent of respondents said they'd recommend the brand they were being quizzed about. We've then seen 10 to 20 percent of customers follow through with social network postings after the survey.
Some recommendations for retailers considering tying together their feedback, social, and operations loops: Customers need some nudging: incentives like coupons do the job. At 100 Boston Market restaurants, customer advocates got $3 coupons for a recommendation. In a three-month period, Boston Market received 100,000 Facebook newsfeed recommendations; advocates redeemed more than 4,000 coupons.
Finding customer advocates isn't the only goal. Unhappy customers need to be channeled through a "customer rescue" process to help solve problems and mend relationships, and provide feedback on problems for operations to solve.
At Citibank branches in New York City, for example, every customer who completes a survey receives a call back from their bank manager within one to two days. The manager uses survey feedback and software intelligence to determine whether complaints need resolution or whether the manager should provide a simple "thank you" to reinforce the local branch's commitment to customer service — like old fashioned retail and small local banks or credit unions still do.
The advocate process is proving far more powerful than regular social network advertising. The key is authenticity: we listen to our friends and colleagues for advice and recommendations. So while retailers and restaurant owners can buy social media advertising, the real place to drive growth is on the consumer newsfeeds. Not only are those kinds of clickthroughs more numerous. They are also more powerful. Beyond simple word of mouth advertising, poor-performing outlets get suggestions for improvement, which they use to guide better operational performance.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Seth's Blog: Insulate yourself...
Seth's Blog: Insulate yourself...
Insulate yourself...
from anonymous angry people
Expose yourself to art you don't yet understand
Precisely measure the results that are important to you
Stay blind to the metrics that don't matter
Fail often
Ship
Lead, don't manage so much
Seek out uncomfortable situations
Make an impact on the people who matter to you
Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else
Copyedit less, invent more
Give more speeches
Ignore unsolicited advice
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Weave Change into Your HR Processes - Brad Power - Harvard Business Review
Weave Change into Your HR Processes - Brad Power - Harvard Business Review
Profound changes in an organization must be led from the top, but human resource professionals can play a big part in making them happen.
Consider HR's role in accelerating Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates' operational improvement initiative. This 4,500-employee Massachusetts healthcare group embarked on "Care Improvement" three years ago. Chief Human Resources Officer Dan Michaud told me how HR has helped weave the initiative into all the firm's processes for managing people:
Recruiting. "We tell recruits that this is an organization that's going through change. We value new perspectives, fresh eyes, and different experiences. We want to engage them in this process. Everyone participates regardless of rank."
Onboarding. "As part of new employee orientation and training, we describe Care Improvement and our expectations."
Training. "We've created our own certification program. The green level is a one-hour online program that introduces concepts. The bronze level requires three days of training, and participants must also be involved in two "Rapid Improvement Events'" (of 3-5 days each). We encourage executives to go to the silver level to be leaders and teachers, and to be able to coach others in improvement. The expectation is that all senior management will attain bronze this year."
Rotating people. "We have a fairly good-sized Care Improvement department. We would like to have a care improvement leader at each site eventually."
Recognizing success: "We do not have monetary rewards for improvement results, but we do recognize successes."
Communicating. "We use our intranet for sharing stories about successes. At every Rapid Improvement Event there is a report-out, to which everyone is invited."
Redeploying people who are freed up by process improvements. "We retrain or redeploy people who are freed up by more efficient processes. We have a policy on layoffs: no-one will be laid off as a result of process improvements."
What do business leaders who are leading change need from HR?
Talent flow. Leaders need help defining new positions and competencies, assessing individuals' competencies, and matching the two.
Rewards. Business change leaders must be sure that rewards are consistent with the new ways of working. A manager in charge of reengineering the way a health insurer interacted with health care providers redesigned the firm's service organization by physician specialties, such as obstetrics and gynecology, so that the people handling inquiries would be knowledgeable about the specialty and could coordinate resolution of issues. She needed help in negotiating a dashboard of shared goals across affected departments. She then needed flexibility to tie performance to shared rewards and to implement non-financial recognition for the multiple departments that affected service.
Training and Development. Leaders must develop other managers' skills at leading changes in the way work is executed. At CSX, the $11 billion railroad, the operations process excellence group develops process improvement and change skills for selected managers. Assistant Vice President John Murphy told me that "high potentials" are appointed to development slots in an 18-month program with more than 250 hours of skills training, including a formal peer assessment that looks at their skills, leadership, and personal style.
Sustaining improvement activities is all about people — managing the social side of change. HR processes can either accelerate or slow progress, so the HR function has a critical role to play.
In future posts, I'll look further at how HR can help operational improvement professionals enable change, and how to reinvent HR to provide these services.
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