“You Are Richer Than You Think.”

In my previous blog entries I have argued about the validity of the People > Service > Profit idea, the importance of Hiring Right and the fact that often good people are stopped by bad processes or bad management.  I am obviously of the view that the road to success for great customer service and experience excellence goes through People Management that is aligned with strategies that make customer service and customer experience into a sustainable strategic differentiator. 

Today’s business environment is constantly changing as companies work to stay competitive. But change only happens when people change their thinking, beliefs, and behaviours. This is hard and requires constant effort from employees and executives. Forrester analyst Claire Schooley reports that “Seven in ten - seventy percent - of change management initiatives fail. That is a dramatically high rate of failure.”  It could happen to you unless you take into account that any change in business process or strategic direction  is strongly related to personal change — that means your people — and this is often the component that gets shortchanged.

This blog entry pursues the line of thought that organizations often fail to realize the impact of change on the employees it will affect. This can be change due to process re-design or strategies and initiatives for sharpening Customer Focus.  They often do not plan and execute carefully enough to address the people issues through all phases of change management.

That means that frequently people are insufficiently informed and engaged and therefore not enabled or allowed to contribute what they could otherwise bring to the table, based on their experience, knowledge and creativity (that everybody has). Over the more than 25 years I have been involved in many types of organizations I have developed the cynical view that more often than not “the enemy is within” and that many organizations unwittingly go to great lengths to give the competition a leg up. I will be so bold as to estimate that thus many organizations are not getting one-third to one quarter of the payroll dollars (and benefits plus overheads) they spend.

My message to a great deal of organization is therefore what it says in the headline (a tagline of a ubiquitous Canadian bank campaign): You Are Richer Than You Think... but you are likely not getting what you pay for. Often organizations don’t know what they don’t know and what they could get from the people they are paying anyway.

Affecting change successfully is admittedly not an easy thing. There are many models, approaches and philosophies. In addition to a clear vision and capable leadership, among others, there is one critical element which I want to highlight here: Communication. Yes, how hard we try, there never appears to be enough of it. It shows up as an improvement opportunity in virtually every employee survey, doesn’t it.

One of my standard recommendations to my clients is to undertake making Communications a forethought rather than the afterthought it so often ends up being. That means they could benefit from appointing a member of a change steering group as Communications Advocate. At each and every turn, decision, new project etc. this person raises the question of What and How for Communication. Of course having a strategy to guide the process always helps...

To conclude, I would like to share with you how impressed I was by the use of an off-the-shelf technology that is cloud based (and does not interfere with or depend on IT infrastructure), to act as enabler and catalyst of customer-driven change. Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts is known for its exemplary service. Just like award other companies competing successfully on a sharp customer focus such as South West Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, Zappos, USAA and Costco, it understands the value of hiring the right people and enabling and empowering them to do right by the customer. Four Seasons decided to employ a Social Intranet (with very similar features to Facebook and LinkedIn) to carry and facilitate its customer service / experience strategy. This platform was simple and quick to deploy technically, but of course needed to be populated with thought and efforts. However, once Redwood eLearning’s BOOST was up and running it took very little effort to manage it. Who did manage it then?  Their people of course... A sure way to ensure that they get from their people what they paid for, and more...

What stops you from harvesting your richness?