Conditions Necessary for Change
The complexity, challenge, and time required for an organization to become truly customer-centric are usually underestimated. It is not just about introducing a new program, training customer contact people to smile over on the phone, or conducting a few customer focus groups. Rather, it is about changing the culture of the organization, a challenge that may seem as difficult as say, rewriting your own DNA. The most successful and dramatic transformation of an organization’s culture took place in the 1980s and was led by Sir Colin Marshall at British Airways. When he arrived at the govern-owned BOAC, it was losing money, abusing customers, and not doing well by its employees. Several years after Sir Colin privatized the company, it was commended for having the most improved service in the industry and for being the most profitable airline in the world. By any standard this remained one of the classic cultural turnarounds.
Study the BA success and others like it and patterns emerge of management actions that help create conditions that assist each and every employee to commit to the new direction and engage in the personal change that is required to bring the customer into the equation at all levels of the organization. These actions are to:
- Articulate and promote the new direction;
- Make sure that each employee knows what is expected;
- See that each employee has the skills to do what is expected
- Motivate each employee to do what is expected.
Looking at those four conditions, it is clear that they are deeply based in common sense. But you would be amazed at how difficult it is to implement them. Common sense, it has been said many times, is unfortunately not common at all.
HOW TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
- Articulate and Promote the New Direction
A study by a management consulting firm asked C.E.O.s to rate their level of confidence in their ability to perform various aspects of their job. Of those asked, 85% felt that they handled strategy development well; strategy execution, conversely, dropped off dramatically to only 40%. When asked about aligning their people with their company’s strategy, the response was an anemic 10%. Articulating and promoting the new direction speaks directly to this deficit.
- Create a Clear Vision and Value Statement to Direct the Organization
This is not a new idea (and for many managers it may fall into the category of been there, done that); many organizations have vision and value statements that seem to have little influence on day-to-day operations and decisions. It helps to have a vision and values audit to test the extent to which adopted vision and values are truly guiding the company and having a positive impact.
- Share the Strategy of the Organization with All Employees
Ironically, a company’s strategy is often deemed so confidential that it is not shared with employees, the people who have to make it happen. Sam Walton knew better; his policy was to share each Wal-Mart store’s vital performance information with all employees and part-timers. He reasoned that they were directly responsible for Wal-Mart’s success.
- Make Sure Each Employee Knows What Is Expected
In a multiyear research program that studied 400 organizations, 80,000 managers, and over a million employees, the Gallup found that one of the factors that correlated highly with the organizations’ success was employees knowing what is expected of them. Sounds obvious, but this is never truer than when a company is changing its strategy. Some key steps are required:
- Use Your Hierarchy to Communicate New Expectations
Have all the managers meet with their people and explain the rationale for the change and what this means for them. The more a picture can be created of appropriate new behavior, the more it is likely to become part of each employee’s daily routine.
- Have Your Employees Create a Line-of-Sight Map between Them and Your Customers
A simple yet powerful exercise: ask employees to start with their location in the organization and create visual trail direct to customers. While most are not in direct contact with external customers, they all have internal customers within the organization. Employees soon realize that a glitch in the internal customer relationship inevitably leads to a problem for external customers.
- Put the Spotlight on Early Adopters
In any organizational change there are fence sitters and early adopters. Fence sitters do little and sit around, complain about another program du jour, and adopt an attitude of “Change is good…you go first.” In contrast, the early adopters make a sincere (though sometimes awkward) effort at trying on the new behaviors to make the strategy work. Since peer success is a powerful influencer, purposely seek out those early adopters and public praise their effort to change. Don’t wait until all results are in; it’s the effort to try things differently that you are actually rewarding. Results will follow.
- See That Each Employee Has the Skills to Do What Is Expected
Once people have an idea of what is expected, it is a mistake to assume that they have the necessary skills to accomplish the stated goals. The key to success is employee training.
How to start?
- Conduct Internal Best Practices Research
Identify best performers in each job category and compare them with their marginally performing counterparts. Identify what superior performers do distinctly. Once critical competences are identified, training exercises can be created to develop these skills in every employee.
- Conduct a Strategic Training Audit
This simple process will pay great dividends. Create a matrix that lists the critical competences required for each job in your company on the left vertical axis and each of your training programs along the top horizontal axis. Then, on a scale of 1to5, simply rate each program’s contribution to the development of each competency. This will help purge redundant programs and fill gaps in competency development.
- Make Your Employees Your Best Trainers
Rather than assigning all development to your company trainers, make it a part of employees’ jobs to help.
- Motivate Each Employee to Do What Is Expected
Now comes the hard part getting people to actually use newly developed skills. Assuming that the compensation and reward system is running smoothly, what are some of the other practices that can create an organization-wide passion for serving the customer?
- Get everyone in the game
In recent years, much has been written about participative management. Why? Because it works. This means engaging in practices like asking employees to help create the vision and values, seeking their opinions on strategic issues, inviting them to innovate and create new processes, and authorizing them to solve problems now – without having to go through layers of approval.
- Introduce The Face Of The Customer
Of course, appropriate metrics based on customer behavior and feedback are also essential. While the voice of the customer continues to be a critical voice here, consider introducing the face of the customer. This means finding ways to personalize the metrics. For example, videotape focus groups and share the results with everyone. A successful medical products manufacturer in Nigeria keeps employees focused on its real purpose by bringing doctors’ patients and their families into the company to share their stories of survival. Such sessions are both inspiring and moving.
- Make It Fun
With the serious and sometimes outright fear caused by downsizings, mergers, stock price collapses, and a near-maniacal focus on quarterly earnings, all too often, the fun has been squeezed out of work.
Changing an organization’s culture is always a complex, even daunting task. In order to become company-centered the leaders of a corporation must first be willing to change themselves. It is their responsibility to create the four conditions cited above that will support each and every employee in understanding the new direction, knowing what is expected, and having the skills and motivation to do what is expected.
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