Employee engagement – Page 16 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 19, 2021

Customer-centric

Last year, at the start of the pandemic, eight staff at the Anchor House Care Home moved in.

They spent 56 nights on makeshift beds, isolated from their own families, to protect their residents.

The result? Nobody in the home even caught Covid-19.

Anchor House is a small care home, in a lovely old house in Doncaster. The only one owned by it’s parent company Authentic Care Services Ltd. According to the CQC it ‘requires improvement’.

Hmmm.

Perhaps the CQC isn’t designed to measure what really matters.

August 18, 2021

Flow

I had my hair cut yesterday. The salon was quiet. No sound except the background radio and the snip of scissors.

After about 20 minutes one of the hairdressers said “You can tell when we’re enjoying our work, we don’t talk.”

“That’s true,” said mine, “When you really get into it, you just concentrate on what you’re doing, you forget to chat.”

Concentrated silence. That’s what flow sounds like.

How often do you hear it in your workplace?

August 16, 2021

Chippendale

In the pre-industrial age, the only way to grow your business was through apprenticeships. Teaching aspiring masters everything you knew one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Once they had mastered their craft those apprentices went off and repeated the process in their own workshops. A few might stay with you if you could get enough work to employ them.

The downside for customers was that everyone tended to make the same, tried and tested stuff for the same local customers. If you wanted to make your mark by producing something different, it was impossible to grow fast enough to keep up with demand.

Thomas Chippendale knew what his gentleman customers in London wanted. He knew that there were similar markets in towns and cities across the country. He couldn’t serve those markets himself, but he could enable other cabinetmakers to do so – with a pattern book that could be sold to both cabinetmakers and gentlemen.

The pattern book specifies the end product – what it should look like, dimensions, some key details. Chippendale knew that of course any master cabinetmaker would know how to construct the pieces. He didn’t need to tell them that.

The result is that each piece produced from the pattern book reflects the skills of the cabinetmaker who used the pattern as inspiration, tailored to the sensibilities of their local gentlemen customer.

‘Chippendale’, but not by Chippendale. A halfway house between handcrafted and factory-made.

Not a bad way to scale your unique approach.

August 12, 2021

Sharing

I’m one of seven children. A lot of work for my mother, who was nominally ‘The Boss’ in our house.

She didn’t like it though.

She resented being the parent who had to get us to do homework, or tidy our rooms, or do the washing up. She resented being the one who shouted and told us off. She resented the fact that her contribution was taken for granted, invisible, unappreciated. Most of all she resented being the one who had to think of everything, for everyone else.

Fortunately for my mum, and as I realised later, for us, she went on strike when she was in her mid 40’s.

From that point on, if we were 16 or over, we took responsibility for ourselves. If we wanted washing done, we did it ourselves. If we wanted clothes ironed, we did it ourselves. If we didn’t like ironing, then we could choose clothes that didn’t need ironing. If we didn’t like tidying our bedrooms, we could live in a mess. If we wanted a different meal from everyone else, we could, as long as we planned and cooked it and washed up ourselves.

It was hard for my mum, because it meant we did quite often live in a mess, but it showed me at least that beyond a certain age, a family, like a small business is a collaborative affair. And that this collaboration works best when its the responsibility that’s shared, not just the work.

Being ‘The Boss’ isn’t as nearly as much fun as people think.

The solution is to make everyone the boss of themselves, within a framework of shared purpose. Everyone is better for it. Especially the business.

August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do. Often they also tell you how to do it. A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’. And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how. It’s uncomfortable. It feels wrong. Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family. You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable. If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss. Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too. So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

July 28, 2021

How does it work?

Ever since I first saw the water clock above the Neal’s Yard wholefood shop, I’ve enjoyed the work of Tim Hunkin. Probably for the same reason I liked to be called a software engineer. I love finding out how things work, and making them work better.

So I was delighted to discover his remastered ‘Secret Life of‘ series on YouTube.

When you know how something works, it stops being ‘some kind of magic’ and becomes a tool to support what you’re really trying to achieve. You can even start to play with it a little, bend it, re-purpose it to create even more value.

What would ‘The Secret Life of <Your Business>‘ reveal to the people who have to use it?

Here’s the episode about the photocopier:

https://youtu.be/FKVO28gTu-g

July 22, 2021

Look behind

Queues are annoying, and rarely the fault of the individual dealing with the front of them.

Tutting because the person is serving someone else at the other end of the store may make you feel better, but it’s unfair.

Look behind your immediate experience to see what’s really going on – a single person is being expected to look after what is effectively 2 stores – the shop counter and the post office counter (3 if you count the coffee kiosk). Despite Schrödinger’s dicoveries, at the macro level of human bodies, they can’t be in two places at once.

Tutting again because they’re not happy about the situation is even more unfair.

If you don’t like the customer experience you’re getting, complain to the people who designed the system. And if it doesn’t improve things, vote with your feet.

The people behind these systems rely on us taking things out on the person in front of us. Because that way we keep everything running just fine – for them.

Consumption is a vital part of the system we all live under. Like everything else we do, we can do it mindfully, intentionally, and with the aim of making things better.

July 21, 2021

Double bubble

What could be more energising than knowing that every action you take contributes directly to a customer’s experience? Nothing superfluous, nothing bureaucratic, nothing but the relationship being created or maintained between you and the person you are serving.

So the perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency, turns out to be the perfect marriage of employee engagement and operational efficiency too.

Double bubble.

What’s not to like?

July 16, 2021

Ma

Ma.

The gaps between things.

The pauses between words or notes.

The white space on a page.

“a holder within which things can exist, stand out and have meaning.”*

“the emptiness full of possibilities, like a promise yet to be fulfilled.”*

The places where we can come alive for each other.

Let’s leave room in our processes for ma.

*from Wawaza.com

July 9, 2021

Concentrated learning

As aboriginal Australians know, the way to deepen learning is to make it immersive. They also know that practising scenarios before you encounter them speeds up the process.

We small businesses have our own form of immersive learning. We call it ‘throwing them in at the deep end’.

Somehow, we hope that through this experience, newbies will learn to make and keep promises on behalf of the business as well as we do. Of course, many don’t, and some just drown.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be happy if pilots learned by being ‘thrown in the deep end’. I prefer what actually happens. They learn in a simulator. A safe space – the paddling pool if you like – where they can be immersed in what if feels like to fly a plane, and systematically run through all the scenarios they may have to cope with – taking off, landing, turbulence, bid strikes, engine failures, and so on.

You and I can feel safe getting on a plane because pilots have literally been through all these experiences many times before they get anywhere near a real cockpit, at the head of a tubeful of passengers and crew.

Why not do the same for your prospects and clients? Build a simulator for your business, program it with likely scenarios and use it to train new people, or practise new services before you deliver them, or explore how you could do things differently. Make it a psychologically safe space and it will be fun, team-bonding and surprisingly productive. It will become a practise space people use regularly to improve your customer experience score.

Discipline makes Daring possible.