Employee engagement – Page 19 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

November 9, 2020

Good Service

My husband pointed me in the direction of this book, and I’m very glad he did. I’m not that far into it and my neck already aches from vigorous nodding in agreement.

On the face of it, this book might not seem appropriate for business that don’t make and keep their promises entirely online.

With a little twist in perspective, that can change:

On page 19, Lou gives this definition of a service: “A service is something that helps someone to do something.”

Our first thought is that the ‘someone‘ is the end user – me paying my car tax or filing a tax return online, via the gov.uk site. But what if that ‘someone‘ was one of your team? And the ‘something‘ they’re trying to ‘do‘ is share your promise so potential clients find it, or deliver on that promise to clients who’ve signed up?

What if you designed your business to be an eco-system of services that help your team do things for themselves? Without the need for supervision or management?

You’d want your ecosystem of services to follow all the principles for a good service:

Easy to find
Clearly explains its purpose
Set a user’s expectations of the service
Enable each user to complete the outcome they set out to do
Work in a way that is familiar
Require no prior knowledge to use
Agnostic of organisational structures
Minimum possible steps to complete
Consistent throughout
No dead ends
Usable by everyone, equally
Encourage the right behaviours from everyone
Quickly respond to change
Clearly explain why a decistion has been made
Make it easy to get human assistance

And in the process deliver these qualities:

It does what the user needs it to do, in a way that works for them
It’s profitable and easy to run
It does not destroy the world we live in, or negatively affect society as a whole

I would also add:

Expresses and reinforces your Promise of Value at every turn.

Unlike the UK government, you’re not delivering to every citizen, but to people who share at least some of your values, behaviours and worldview, and they will want to see that reflected in the way you do things for them.

This is what I call a Customer Experience Score. The ecosystem that turns your small business into an orchestra, playing your unique music for the people you serve, with no need for supervision or management.

I’m going to explore all of these points over the next few posts or so, as I work out how to apply this for my own business and for my clients. I think you’ll find it useful. I hope you’ll find it enjoyable too.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to buy the book, you can order it from my favourite bookshop.

October 23, 2020

Watching other people work

I must confess to having a bit of a thing about phone answering services. Not because I dislike them, but because I think they are one of those things that can really enhance the customer experience when done well.

You can always tell when someone is using an answering service, because you get asked more questions that you often would, and you can tell there’s a process going on. That’s a good thing, something more businesses that answer their own phones should learn to do. It would save a lot of miscommunication.

When someone providing this service does it really well, I have a genuine conversation. I am allowed to ramble a little about why I’m calling (the person I want to speak to knows I’m due to call and why), but they still get from me (not necessarily by asking me) the information they need to pass on the message – my name (including how to spell it), my business name, why I’m calling and who I want to speak to, and finally how they can get hold of me.

I can even have a separate conversation about the fact that they provide the service, which is how I found out who they were.

Its a pleasure to participate in someone doing their job with commitment intelligence and humanity. Its an enjoyable experience for me as customer, prospect or supplier as well as for the person doing it.

That’s why your Customer Experience Score^TM needs to cover everything.

PS the company was Take My Calls. When my current credit runs out, I’ll be switching to them.

October 21, 2020

This was last weekend’s reading.

Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.

October 6, 2020

I have really good people

Of course, you’ve surrounded yourself with really good people.

How are they actually spending their efforts? Delighting clients, or dreaming up new, better ways to deliver on your Promise of Value?

Or are they re-inventing the wheel? Teaching new recruits the ropes? Trying to remember what they did the last time that rare, but surprisingly regular occurrence cropped up? Finding ways to get around the software system that actually makes their job harder? Looking for another job?

Every member of an orchestra knows how to play their instrument. They don’t need to be told where to put their fingers. But they do appreciate having a score to follow. A score means they don’t have to think too hard about 80% of the job, freeing up energy and imagination to deal with the 20% that makes all the difference to performance. That 20% is what keeps clients happy, loyal, willing to pay extra and eager to tell their friends about you.

But the real power of a score is that it enables your team to bring their whole selves to bear – time after time, performance after performance.

And that’s what keeps your team engaged, aligned and proactively taking responsibility.

Really good people can be even better with a score.

September 14, 2020

Interference

Last Friday, the materials for our new roof were delivered. Tiles, ridge tiles, clips, battens, everything the roofers would need to start the job the following day.

Except, I spotted, the membrane that goes between joists and tiles. Without that the job couldn’t even start. To be honest, we’re relaxed about the schedule, but I knew our building company prides itself on being ahead, rather than behind, and our choice of tiles had taken time to source, so they were only just ‘on track’.

I could see the delivery driver had a pallet-load of it on his truck, so I asked the question, just in case. It wasn’t on his delivery sheet, so he called the office. They didn’t have it in the order either.

“Well I’ve got a pallet load here, so I’ll take a roll off and we can sort out the order with our client back in the office. That saves me coming back later if it is missing.”

When I told our project manager, she said that’s why they always use that building supply company, because they focus first on foremost on taking care of their clients and end-users, rather than sticking rigidly to procedure.

I’d interfered in the process wrongly, as it happened. The membrane wasn’t missing. When the roofers turned up next day, they brought a big roll of it with them, and put it back in their van once they saw it wasn’t needed.

Obviously what was really missing was a clear understanding of who’s responsible for what, apart from inside the project manager’s head. Does it always work this way? Or does that depend on the roofer? If everyone (including the client?) knows it’s always the supplier’s job to supply everything, this sort of mix-up wouldn’t happen.

What could remedy that? A Customer Experience Score.

Not a procedures manual to consult every five minutes and follow slavishly. Rather, a high-level picture of ‘what happens when’ that can be quickly and easily learnt by each new person or business that comes on board. Something that says “This is how we do things, so if you join us, you need to understand this too”. That way everyone is empowered to make sure things happen as they should, even if they don’t actually work for you.

In this case the mix-up happened the right way round. The roofers finished at 10pm on Sunday, having worked their socks off for two days. Our build is back on schedule, and I’m happy to recommend our building company to anyone.

But I’m also going to suggest a little composition.

September 3, 2020

Avoiding Bureaucracy

For Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini the opposite of ‘humanocracy’ is ‘bureaucracy’:

“In a bureaucracy, human beings are instruments, employed by an organization to create products and services. In a humanocracy, the organization is the instrument – it’s the vehicle human beings use to better their lives and the lives of those they serve.”

Here’s a quote from Dee Hock that I think, sums up nicely how we get to ‘bureaucracy’:

“We grow to detest any societal organization in which we have no secure place and can find no meaningful life. We ignore it when we can, circumvent it when we must, destroy it if we are able. An organization that does not provide a secure, equitable, meaningful place for each person of which it is composed is not civilised at all; it is to a greater or lesser degree, tyrannical and barbaric.”

In truth, all organisations are instruments, consciously or unconsciously wielded. As Eric Reis observed to Airbnb’s Brian Chesky:

“The product you make is not your website, it’s not the travel, its not even the delightful experiences, the product is the organisation that brings stakeholders together to produce those outcomes.”

The questions to ask are:

Whose lives are you bettering?
At what cost to the rest of the world?

It seems to me, that if we want to build a truly successful enterprise that will carry on without us, we should maximise the answer to the first, and minimse the answer to the second.

Fortunately, we’ve invented several ways to do that. One of which is mine.

August 20, 2020

One size fits no-one

Standardisation is useful. Standard shoe and clothing sizes enabled manufacture at scale, which in turn meant that more people could afford decent clothes and shoes than ever before. Standard sizes are worked out by taking averages of the actual population.

Standardised clothing works for two reasons. First because sizes are based on at most two or three dimensions. This means that any given individual is more likely to fall within an average range for a given size. There will be exceptions (I can never find gloves to fit), but they will be rare. The other reason is that clothes are soft, they have give. People can easily adjust the standard to suit themselves. You can belt a baggy shirt, or wear extra socks inside too-big shoes. A slightly too-tight dress will stretch a little. You can at least be comfortable, if not always elegant.

Averaging over multiple dimensions, especially for something rigid, like a building, an office, or a cockpit is far less successful – even dangerous. Nobody fits this kind of average, so everyone becomes uncomfortable and inefficient.

The same goes for business processes. No two businesses do things in quite the same way – not even when they are doing the same job. So forcing your way of doing things into a generic off-the-shelf pattern squeezes out diffentiation, turning you into a commodity. It also makes the people running the process both uncomfortable and inefficient.

Those are the last things you or your customers want.

The alternative isn’t to tailor everything from scratch every time.

If you’ve been in business for a few years, you will have your own set of patterns for ‘the way we do things round here’.

Identify them, create templates from them. Then use them to build processes that are fully adjustable by the people who will actually use them.

Adjustable gives far better results than the average.

August 6, 2020

Make it well, make it last

“Do your work as though you had a thousand years to live and as if you were to die tomorrow.” Shaker saying.

If I have a thousand years to live, I’m going to see the long-term consequences of my work. I won’t be able to hide behind ‘I won’t be here, it doesn’t matter to me’. I’d better be making sure my work is solid and my impact positive.

If I’m going to die tomorrow, I can’t hide behind ‘I’ll get round to that later’. I’d better be getting on with it.

Now is the only time we have to make a difference.

Luckily, making a difference is the most satisfying work there is.

July 13, 2020

“Not with the people I’ve got” Or, how to waste talent efficiently.

Back in the 70’s there was a TV series called ‘The Troubleshooter’.

Each week, captain of industry Sir John Harvey-Jones would visit an ailing British manufacturing company, and advise them on how to turn around their fortunes.

One of his insights really stuck in my mind. It goes something like this:

“These people working for you, have a rich life outside work, where they build complex systems, run clubs, manage budgets, research everything there is to know about their particular interest, invent things. You make them leave all of that at the door. What a waste!”

Whenever I tell people about Matt Black Systems, a manufacturing company with no managers, no administrators, and almost no overheads, the reply I most often get is “I couldn’t do that, not with the people I’ve got.”

It’s not the people that are the problem, it’s our model of what a business is. 50 years on from ‘The Troubshooter’, we’re using AI and automation to track and reward attendance, not contribution.

That’s an efficient waste of talent.

July 10, 2020

“What would happen if we removed all Managers?”

Lisa Haggar started a lively discussion on this topic on LinkedIn today:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lisa-haggar-540a68117_whatnomanager-selfmanagement-timesarechanging-activity-6687251785352024065-esUl

Of course I had to join in.

Why not join in too? I’d love to know what you think.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Employee engagement