>O2 > Seven Ways To Motivate

>

by Julie Rains

There are two types of leaders: those who believe that you can motivate people, and those who believe that motivation comes from within. I reside firmly in the second camp, so, for me, discussing ways to motivate—and easy ones in particular—may seem odd. But it’s not. When we try to motivate people, what we’re really doing is encouraging people to act on already-present motivation, ideally in a way that furthers the organization’s mission.

How do we do that?

Encourage and applaud great ideas

Be clear about the strategic direction of your organization and the types of ideas that are relevant to your needs. Open and maintain dialogue about critical areas, such as reasons for shifts in consumption patterns and fluctuating attendance at weekly events.

Allow idea-sharing in many ways, both formal and informal. Conduct meetings featuring formal presentations with detailed action plans. In addition, accept pitches via e-mail, and coax brainstorming and idea-polishing through impromptu conversations.

Don’t disparage bad ideas

When people are encouraged to suggest great ideas, it’s inevitable that they will present really bad ones. To create and maintain an environment that supports innovation and creative problem-solving, help them cull through ideas independently.

Again, be clear about company direction, priorities, and needs as a way of vetting ideas. Ask:

• What will be accomplished by implementing this idea?
• What is the cost?
• What groups will you need support from?
• What alternatives have you tried to date?
• How will you test the idea?

Give guidance when needed

When starting a new project or assignment, even the most enthusiastic and conscientious employees need to understand your direction. Some may falter at certain points requiring decisions beyond their current capabilities. Others, despite depth of experience and knowledge, may get stuck at a crossroads. To keep moving forward and keep people engaged, clarify results desired, warn about pitfalls and respond to requests on specific issues.

  

Match assignments with talents

Those who are knowledgeable, skillful and experienced in certain disciplines excel with minimal prompting when given assignments in sync with their talents. They show initiative because they know how to launch a project; what questions to ask to define its scope and desired outcomes; what resources to gather; and what experts to consult. They self-manage to completion because they know what objectives to establish, how to evaluate whether they are on the right track and when to announce they are finished.

There may be minor tasks that are part of a project that do not fit inclinations. Reassign these duties or show how to accomplish the mundane before returning to the work that matters.

Expect great performance

Stir passion by expecting people to achieve great results. Envision in a way that indicates excited anticipation, not tyrannical demand. Support expectations through encouragement, deep respect of abilities and understanding of the challenges needed to persevere when tackling a new project, taking on more responsibility, etc.

Give time to handle personal business

Family needs, health issues and any number of personal concerns distract people from acting on their motivation. Truly motivated people concentrate on the tasks at hand rather than obsessing about their private lives. But certain things require attention: life milestones, such as a recent marriage or new baby; crises, such as an accident or death in the family; or ongoing problems, such as chronic disease.

Give appropriate amounts of time away and offer resources to assist with these concerns. Results won’t be immediate; it takes a while to handle repercussions of an accident, for example. But acknowledgment of both happy occasions and difficulties motivate people by letting them know that they can be committed to your project without forsaking personal and family needs.

Show how mundane tasks fit together to achieve great things

Sharing your vision is inspirational…eventually.

I’ve noticed that many people (especially those in new positions) don’t seem very interested in hearing about how day-to-day actions can result in an amazing future. Talking about the big picture elicits confused looks and blank stares. Your employees, volunteers, colleagues, etc. want precise instructions so that they can get things done correctly, and move quickly to more exciting endeavors.

Eventually, though, the vision and the steps needed to achieve goals make sense. When people see clearly how certain actions will take them down the desired paths, they take action and make good decisions without hesitation, on their own, by drawing upon their internal stores of motivation. 

Source: Amex Open Forum

Julie Rains

Senior Writer, Wise Bread

(Wise Bread)

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>2011 Hiring Outlook

>

By Ilya Leybovich

 

Although 2010 was a year of economic recovery, employment conditions continue to lag and millions of Americans still struggle to find work. Will hiring prospects in the new year provide a light at the end of the tunnel?
Following a difficult two-year period of mounting job losses, unemployment conditions in the United States bottomed out in 2010. But while the general economy has been recovering from the economic downturn, the job market has remained volatile and the national unemployment rate has hovered just below the 10-percent mark for most of the year. With millions of Americans still struggling to find work, the hiring outlook for 2011 will determine whether this will be a jobless recovery or not…

After peaking at 10.1 percent in October 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate evened out and began to drop, falling to 9.7 percent in the first half of 2010 and then 9.5 percent in June and July, according to historical data from the U.S. Department of Labor. However, the slow but steady improvements then reversed, with unemployment rising to 9.6 percent in August and then to 9.8 percent in November.
The latest monthly Employment Situation report from the Labor Dept. indicates that the U.S. economy added 39,000 non-farm jobs in November, a relatively meaningless gain considering the pace of new adults entering the workforce and the 15.1 million people currently unemployed.
“At that rate, job growth can’t do much to bring down the unemployment rate,” the Wall Street Journal explains. “To compensate for population growth alone, the economy needs to add about 100,000 jobs a month. And even if the job market improves, more discouraged job seekers will likely try to re-enter the labor force, adding to the ranks of people who are counted as unemployed.”
Despite taking a turn for the worse in the closing months of 2010, employment conditions are poised to start improving in 2011 and possibly compensate for many of the losses incurred in the last quarter of the year.
A quarterly survey of 18,000 employers conducted by employment services and research firm Manpower, released in December, found that hiring expectations for the first quarter of 2011 were at their highest level in two years. The seasonally adjusted hiring outlook among employers rose to +9 percent, up from +5 percent in Q4 2010 and +5 percent in Q1 2010, reflecting the most positive expectations since the fourth quarter of 2008.
Fourteen percent of employers surveyed said they anticipate an increase in their staff levels during the first quarter of the new year, while 10 percent expect a decrease in payrolls over the same period. Seventy-three percent of employers plan to make no changes to their staff levels and the remaining 3 percent are undecided about their hiring plans.
Broken down geographically, the Manpower data indicate positive net hiring expectations in every major U.S. region. Fourteen percent of employers in the Northeast, Midwest and West expect increases in year-over-year hiring in Q1 2011, while 15 percent in the South expect an increase.
In terms of specific business sectors, Manpower reports the most positive hiring expectations for the leisure and hospitality industry, in which 22 percent of employers plan to increase staffing levels in the next quarter. The next most promising hiring plans for Q1 2011 are in professional and business services, followed by the information industry and wholesale and retail trade.
“The fact that hiring expectations are trending upward is an encouraging sign,” Jonas Prising, Manpower president of the Americas, said in an announcement of the findings. “This quarter’s survey responses paint a picture of a job market that is easing up, although not as quickly as anyone would like. We are still stuck in first gear, but the ongoing sector-wide improvement we have seen over the last year suggests that the labor market is ready to shift to a higher gear in 2011.”
According to a November survey from tax advisory firm Grant Thornton, employment conditions in U.S. manufacturing may be better than those in the general economy in the first half of 2011. Forty-nine percent of manufacturers who responded to the survey plan to increase their staff in the first six months of the year, compared with 43 percent of overall respondents.
Tech hiring is also expected to see a major boost. A survey last month from tech job search firm Dice.com found that roughly 60 percent of hiring managers for tech companies plan to increase hiring in the next six months. Forty-five percent expect to boost hiring by at least 10 percent, while 15 percent plan to increase hiring by up to 30 percent.
The improvement in the hiring outlook for 2011 partly stems from better expectations for capital spending and earnings growth. According to a global survey of 848 chief financial officers (CFOs) conducted by CFO Magazine and Duke University, U.S. firms plan to increase the full-time workforce by 2 percent in 2011, the largest planned hiring increase since early 2006. Hiring is forecast to be particularly strong in the tech and service/consulting industries.
“The U.S. employment picture is improving,” John Graham, professor of finance at Duke University and the director of the survey, said in an announcement of the findings. “At a normal rate of labor force growth, employment expansion of 2 percent should reduce unemployment below 9 percent by the end of 2011. At the same time, the U.S. is still sending jobs overseas, with an expected 5 percent increase in outsourced jobs in 2011.”
Access to credit among small businesses — which are traditionally the driving force behind new job creation — will be a major factor in future hiring prospects. Tough lending conditions for smaller firms is likely to make the job market recovery slower than it would be otherwise.
“In a typical recovery, most job growth comes from small firms,” Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke and founding director of the survey, said. “Therefore, the difficulty in borrowing by small companies will continue to shackle economic growth and job creation going forward.”
The 2011 employment forecast from Kiplinger projects that 2.5 million jobs will be created this year, up from 1 million new jobs in 2010. Although productivity is still rising, it is climbing at a slower pace, meaning that employers will find it harder to delay hiring workers as the economy expands and new orders increase.
“Still, the unemployment rate will remain high,” Kiplinger warns. “Now 9.8 percent, it’s likely to decline to a bit below 9 percent over the course of [2011]. GDP growth will need to continue at 3.5 percent or more in 2012 to bring the rate significantly lower.”

Earlier
Employment Outlook 2010
Obama Signs Bill to Help Small Biz

Resources
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
U.S. Department of Labor, December 2010
The Employment Situation — November 2010
U.S. Department of Labor, Dec. 3, 2010
Gyrating Numbers are Misleading
by Mark Whitehouse
The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 2010
Employment Outlook Survey: United States
Manpower, Inc., December 2010
…Most Promising U.S. Hiring Outlook Since 2008
Manpower, Inc., Dec. 7, 2010
Growing Optimism in Manufacturing as 49% Plan to Increase Hiring in Next Six Months
Grant Thornton, Dec. 13, 2010
Special Edition, December 2010
Dice.com, December 2010
Duke/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey
Duke University and CFO Magazine, December 2010
CFO Survey: Outlook Improves, Spending and Employment Trend Upward
Duke University News, Dec. 14, 2010
Economic Outlook: Employment
Kiplinger, Dec. 10, 2010

Boost your Business Oxygen by visiting our Related Knowledge Centers

>2011 Hiring Outlook

>

By Ilya Leybovich

 

Although 2010 was a year of economic recovery, employment conditions continue to lag and millions of Americans still struggle to find work. Will hiring prospects in the new year provide a light at the end of the tunnel?
Following a difficult two-year period of mounting job losses, unemployment conditions in the United States bottomed out in 2010. But while the general economy has been recovering from the economic downturn, the job market has remained volatile and the national unemployment rate has hovered just below the 10-percent mark for most of the year. With millions of Americans still struggling to find work, the hiring outlook for 2011 will determine whether this will be a jobless recovery or not…

After peaking at 10.1 percent in October 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate evened out and began to drop, falling to 9.7 percent in the first half of 2010 and then 9.5 percent in June and July, according to historical data from the U.S. Department of Labor. However, the slow but steady improvements then reversed, with unemployment rising to 9.6 percent in August and then to 9.8 percent in November.
The latest monthly Employment Situation report from the Labor Dept. indicates that the U.S. economy added 39,000 non-farm jobs in November, a relatively meaningless gain considering the pace of new adults entering the workforce and the 15.1 million people currently unemployed.
“At that rate, job growth can’t do much to bring down the unemployment rate,” the Wall Street Journal explains. “To compensate for population growth alone, the economy needs to add about 100,000 jobs a month. And even if the job market improves, more discouraged job seekers will likely try to re-enter the labor force, adding to the ranks of people who are counted as unemployed.”
Despite taking a turn for the worse in the closing months of 2010, employment conditions are poised to start improving in 2011 and possibly compensate for many of the losses incurred in the last quarter of the year.
A quarterly survey of 18,000 employers conducted by employment services and research firm Manpower, released in December, found that hiring expectations for the first quarter of 2011 were at their highest level in two years. The seasonally adjusted hiring outlook among employers rose to +9 percent, up from +5 percent in Q4 2010 and +5 percent in Q1 2010, reflecting the most positive expectations since the fourth quarter of 2008.
Fourteen percent of employers surveyed said they anticipate an increase in their staff levels during the first quarter of the new year, while 10 percent expect a decrease in payrolls over the same period. Seventy-three percent of employers plan to make no changes to their staff levels and the remaining 3 percent are undecided about their hiring plans.
Broken down geographically, the Manpower data indicate positive net hiring expectations in every major U.S. region. Fourteen percent of employers in the Northeast, Midwest and West expect increases in year-over-year hiring in Q1 2011, while 15 percent in the South expect an increase.
In terms of specific business sectors, Manpower reports the most positive hiring expectations for the leisure and hospitality industry, in which 22 percent of employers plan to increase staffing levels in the next quarter. The next most promising hiring plans for Q1 2011 are in professional and business services, followed by the information industry and wholesale and retail trade.
“The fact that hiring expectations are trending upward is an encouraging sign,” Jonas Prising, Manpower president of the Americas, said in an announcement of the findings. “This quarter’s survey responses paint a picture of a job market that is easing up, although not as quickly as anyone would like. We are still stuck in first gear, but the ongoing sector-wide improvement we have seen over the last year suggests that the labor market is ready to shift to a higher gear in 2011.”
According to a November survey from tax advisory firm Grant Thornton, employment conditions in U.S. manufacturing may be better than those in the general economy in the first half of 2011. Forty-nine percent of manufacturers who responded to the survey plan to increase their staff in the first six months of the year, compared with 43 percent of overall respondents.
Tech hiring is also expected to see a major boost. A survey last month from tech job search firm Dice.com found that roughly 60 percent of hiring managers for tech companies plan to increase hiring in the next six months. Forty-five percent expect to boost hiring by at least 10 percent, while 15 percent plan to increase hiring by up to 30 percent.
The improvement in the hiring outlook for 2011 partly stems from better expectations for capital spending and earnings growth. According to a global survey of 848 chief financial officers (CFOs) conducted by CFO Magazine and Duke University, U.S. firms plan to increase the full-time workforce by 2 percent in 2011, the largest planned hiring increase since early 2006. Hiring is forecast to be particularly strong in the tech and service/consulting industries.
“The U.S. employment picture is improving,” John Graham, professor of finance at Duke University and the director of the survey, said in an announcement of the findings. “At a normal rate of labor force growth, employment expansion of 2 percent should reduce unemployment below 9 percent by the end of 2011. At the same time, the U.S. is still sending jobs overseas, with an expected 5 percent increase in outsourced jobs in 2011.”
Access to credit among small businesses — which are traditionally the driving force behind new job creation — will be a major factor in future hiring prospects. Tough lending conditions for smaller firms is likely to make the job market recovery slower than it would be otherwise.
“In a typical recovery, most job growth comes from small firms,” Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke and founding director of the survey, said. “Therefore, the difficulty in borrowing by small companies will continue to shackle economic growth and job creation going forward.”
The 2011 employment forecast from Kiplinger projects that 2.5 million jobs will be created this year, up from 1 million new jobs in 2010. Although productivity is still rising, it is climbing at a slower pace, meaning that employers will find it harder to delay hiring workers as the economy expands and new orders increase.
“Still, the unemployment rate will remain high,” Kiplinger warns. “Now 9.8 percent, it’s likely to decline to a bit below 9 percent over the course of [2011]. GDP growth will need to continue at 3.5 percent or more in 2012 to bring the rate significantly lower.”

Earlier
Employment Outlook 2010
Obama Signs Bill to Help Small Biz

Resources
Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
U.S. Department of Labor, December 2010
The Employment Situation — November 2010
U.S. Department of Labor, Dec. 3, 2010
Gyrating Numbers are Misleading
by Mark Whitehouse
The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 2010
Employment Outlook Survey: United States
Manpower, Inc., December 2010
…Most Promising U.S. Hiring Outlook Since 2008
Manpower, Inc., Dec. 7, 2010
Growing Optimism in Manufacturing as 49% Plan to Increase Hiring in Next Six Months
Grant Thornton, Dec. 13, 2010
Special Edition, December 2010
Dice.com, December 2010
Duke/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey
Duke University and CFO Magazine, December 2010
CFO Survey: Outlook Improves, Spending and Employment Trend Upward
Duke University News, Dec. 14, 2010
Economic Outlook: Employment
Kiplinger, Dec. 10, 2010

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement

>

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

Earlier this week in Boston, we ran a small, intimate workshop for about 20 of our 1to1 Media “insiders.” These are folks who regularly access our Web site and Webinars, subscribe to the 1to1 Magazine or to our new journal, and so forth. We hand-picked the participants from our opt-in database, in order to ensure that the room would be filled with people who had their “fingers on the trigger” of analytics at their companies. What we wanted most were those folks who were wrestling with the problem of starting, upgrading, or just managing their companies’ customer analytics functions.
It’s clear now, from our vantage point almost one tenth the way through the 21st Century, that numbers and analytics of all kinds will play a more and more important role in our existence. If you haven’t yet read the book Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, you owe it to yourself to get it and learn why numbers have become more dominant in nearly every arena of life. And there are a number of other books out there chronicling the same trend toward ever more useful and pervasive quantitative analysis.
Nevertheless, the typical business still can’t get its act together when it comes to using numbers for anything other than financial reporting.

Very few firms use statistical analysis to try to generate insights about the past and guess more accurately about the future, despite the fact that many companies are now sitting on extremely large quantities of data. So one of our goals at this workshop was to do a better job of understanding why companies are holding back. What is it that prevents firms from taking a more data-driven approach to their business?
As Ginger Conlon, our editor in chief, explains in her post on the Think Customers blog, our participants identified several issues they considered important, but at one level or another all of these issues tended to derive from poor organizational alignment. The issues identified by our workshop participants as those they were most concerned with were:

• Having and leveraging the right data for such high-value activities as understanding potential wallet size or determining future value
• Ability to gain credibility for the ROI measurements, especially for the softer benefits
• Data cleanliness and accuracy issues. Including the ability to integrate customer data from multiple silos
• Silos of conflicting responsibilities, and lack of accountability as a result

During the workshop, we organized ourselves into table groups to address each of these issues independently, but we came up with common-sense solutions that were remarkably similar.
One of the key mechanisms a company can use to address these obstacles is compensation – both individual and organizational compensation. At our own table, we had one participant from a large, well-known mobile phone carrier, and his problem was that even though they often had data that could be used to sell more things to individual customers, the sales force was rarely interested in these insights. Usually this was because the commission and bonus structure didn’t reward data-driven selling. If you pay bonuses based on the volume of new-customer acquisitions, for instance, then you risk having sales people who are unwavering in their attention to that goal, to the exclusion of all other objectives. Commissions and bonuses can create a marvelous engine for growth, but if you don’t align your compensation structure with your customer analytics insights, then you’re still not going to get any use from those insights.
Another participant at our table was from a mid-sized online business whose customer service center was run in Canada, and had proved particularly unresponsive to marketing’s constant requests for better customer service processes. Why? Because at this company the call center is treated as a cost center, not as a “satisfaction center.” Their budget and profit targets are set almost exclusively with an eye on cost-minimization, so every single initiative is evaluated against that yardstick. Anything that adds cost is bad. Revenue and satisfaction improvements don’t count, because they aren’t included among the evaluation criteria. The folks at the service center resisted service improvements and data-driven initiatives because the service center itself would not benefit, and would in fact be penalized by the additional costs required to execute these initiatives. So this is an example of poor “organizational” compensation.
Managing with numbers, while it sounds like the logical thing to do, is obviously more difficult than most of us realize. In the final analysis, we concluded that two important things had to occur in order for a business to embrace analytics.

1. Compensation structure must further this goal. And we’re not just talking about individual salaries, bonuses, and commissions, but organizational compensation, as well – capital budgets, headcounts, and so forth.
2. In addition, managers need to be engaged in the “manage by the numbers” mission, personally. They have to have personal confidence in the wisdom of data-driven decision making, rather than always trusting to instinct and judgment. Instinct and judgment are important, but in the 21st Century they must be supplemented by real numbers.

Boost your Business Oxygen by visiting our Related Knowledge Centers

>Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement

>

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

Earlier this week in Boston, we ran a small, intimate workshop for about 20 of our 1to1 Media “insiders.” These are folks who regularly access our Web site and Webinars, subscribe to the 1to1 Magazine or to our new journal, and so forth. We hand-picked the participants from our opt-in database, in order to ensure that the room would be filled with people who had their “fingers on the trigger” of analytics at their companies. What we wanted most were those folks who were wrestling with the problem of starting, upgrading, or just managing their companies’ customer analytics functions.
It’s clear now, from our vantage point almost one tenth the way through the 21st Century, that numbers and analytics of all kinds will play a more and more important role in our existence. If you haven’t yet read the book Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, you owe it to yourself to get it and learn why numbers have become more dominant in nearly every arena of life. And there are a number of other books out there chronicling the same trend toward ever more useful and pervasive quantitative analysis.
Nevertheless, the typical business still can’t get its act together when it comes to using numbers for anything other than financial reporting.

Very few firms use statistical analysis to try to generate insights about the past and guess more accurately about the future, despite the fact that many companies are now sitting on extremely large quantities of data. So one of our goals at this workshop was to do a better job of understanding why companies are holding back. What is it that prevents firms from taking a more data-driven approach to their business?
As Ginger Conlon, our editor in chief, explains in her post on the Think Customers blog, our participants identified several issues they considered important, but at one level or another all of these issues tended to derive from poor organizational alignment. The issues identified by our workshop participants as those they were most concerned with were:

• Having and leveraging the right data for such high-value activities as understanding potential wallet size or determining future value
• Ability to gain credibility for the ROI measurements, especially for the softer benefits
• Data cleanliness and accuracy issues. Including the ability to integrate customer data from multiple silos
• Silos of conflicting responsibilities, and lack of accountability as a result

During the workshop, we organized ourselves into table groups to address each of these issues independently, but we came up with common-sense solutions that were remarkably similar.
One of the key mechanisms a company can use to address these obstacles is compensation – both individual and organizational compensation. At our own table, we had one participant from a large, well-known mobile phone carrier, and his problem was that even though they often had data that could be used to sell more things to individual customers, the sales force was rarely interested in these insights. Usually this was because the commission and bonus structure didn’t reward data-driven selling. If you pay bonuses based on the volume of new-customer acquisitions, for instance, then you risk having sales people who are unwavering in their attention to that goal, to the exclusion of all other objectives. Commissions and bonuses can create a marvelous engine for growth, but if you don’t align your compensation structure with your customer analytics insights, then you’re still not going to get any use from those insights.
Another participant at our table was from a mid-sized online business whose customer service center was run in Canada, and had proved particularly unresponsive to marketing’s constant requests for better customer service processes. Why? Because at this company the call center is treated as a cost center, not as a “satisfaction center.” Their budget and profit targets are set almost exclusively with an eye on cost-minimization, so every single initiative is evaluated against that yardstick. Anything that adds cost is bad. Revenue and satisfaction improvements don’t count, because they aren’t included among the evaluation criteria. The folks at the service center resisted service improvements and data-driven initiatives because the service center itself would not benefit, and would in fact be penalized by the additional costs required to execute these initiatives. So this is an example of poor “organizational” compensation.
Managing with numbers, while it sounds like the logical thing to do, is obviously more difficult than most of us realize. In the final analysis, we concluded that two important things had to occur in order for a business to embrace analytics.

1. Compensation structure must further this goal. And we’re not just talking about individual salaries, bonuses, and commissions, but organizational compensation, as well – capital budgets, headcounts, and so forth.
2. In addition, managers need to be engaged in the “manage by the numbers” mission, personally. They have to have personal confidence in the wisdom of data-driven decision making, rather than always trusting to instinct and judgment. Instinct and judgment are important, but in the 21st Century they must be supplemented by real numbers.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

>

Customer Strategist Orkun Oguz: The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Products don’t generate revenues.
Customers do.

But in order to satisfy customers and build the types of trusting relationships that will help companies maximize their revenue potential, organizations must first have properly motivated and engaged employees.
Employee engagement involves the steps that companies take to capture the hearts and minds of their employees, and motivate them to give their best effort to customers.
You can’t become a customer-centric organization until you’ve become employee centric. Your company is only as strong and effective as your customer-facing staff. There will always be critical moments for your customers that no CRM suite or marketing script can address. Only an engaged, caring, customer-facing staff can handle these types of instances properly.
A highly-engaged employee typically feels more connected to the business and its performance. In fact, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, the level of employee engagement at companies that have achieved compound annual profit growth of at least 10 percent for a five-year period is more than 20 percent higher than at single-digit growth companies.
In addition to connecting customers with the right employees who are incented to fulfill their needs, companies realize other meaningful business benefits from having engaged workers. Employee turnover will be reduced, particularly in high-churn areas such as contact centers. HR costs will drop as companies have to devote less time and capital to recruiting new employees. That will also lead to lower training costs as companies retain longer-tenured, knowledgeable workers.
Nevertheless, the HR-related cost savings that stem from these actions pale in comparison to the impact that a highly engaged employee will have on cross-sell/upsell rates and other favorable business outcomes that result from happy, satisfied customers.

Employees are not equal
Just as companies need to treat different customers differently, they also must treat different employees differently. Not just in terms of compensation, but also how each employee responds uniquely to different styles of communication. They also have different needs and motivations; they each bring a different value proposition to the organization. Because of their unique qualities and capabilities, individual employees also require different types of training, acknowledgment, project assignments, and career progression paths. Some employees have a strong aptitude for assuaging customers who are upset. Other workers are adept at seizing opportunities for upselling customers at just the right time.
Decision-makers also need to recognize that there are roles within the organization where an employee’s impact is considerably greater than their rank or pay grade. For instance, contact center agents don’t rank among the highest-paid employees in most companies, yet their impact on the organization’s business outcomes with customers is substantial. Such groups should be identified and handled with special care.
While business leaders can’t necessarily pay contact center agents more, they can segment employees based on their skills or value to the organization and provide them with different types of incentives. These can include flex hours for working mothers or tuition support for workers attending night school. Incentives can also be tailored to meet an employee’s particular motivation. For instance, some employees value public recognition of their efforts by senior executives in town hall-type meetings.
Another effective technique for motivating and engaging employees is by placing them through a variety of rotational job assignments. This will give high-potential employees a chance to learn more about different parts of the organization while strengthening their skills, as well as the company’s bench strength.
There are also techniques that can be applied to help motivate and incent employees based on compensation levers. For example, companies can create special teams of contact center agents who are particularly adept at retaining high-risk customers. Agents who work in such groups can be compensated differently, including performance-based pay or bonuses that are tied to customer satisfaction and churn rates.
Applying the Golden Rule
When decision-makers take steps to motivate and incent their top-performing employees, they should be sure not to overlook their “B” team players whose contributions to the company are also critical. The best way to do this is by setting transparent performance and rewards criteria for all employees, including the availability of training programs and the requirements for reaching different pay levels. The criteria itself can be based on an employee’s performance grades and their direct and indirect influence on customer satisfaction scores.
Highly engaged and motivated employees are more likely to go above and beyond the call of duty for your company’s customers. Ultimately, that will lead to happier, more satisfied customers whose loyalty will be reflected in their business value to your company.
About the Author: Orkun Oguz is a managing partner at Peppers & Rogers Group.

Boost your Business Oxygen by visiting our Related Knowledge Centers

>The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

>

Customer Strategist Orkun Oguz: The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Products don’t generate revenues.
Customers do.

But in order to satisfy customers and build the types of trusting relationships that will help companies maximize their revenue potential, organizations must first have properly motivated and engaged employees.
Employee engagement involves the steps that companies take to capture the hearts and minds of their employees, and motivate them to give their best effort to customers.
You can’t become a customer-centric organization until you’ve become employee centric. Your company is only as strong and effective as your customer-facing staff. There will always be critical moments for your customers that no CRM suite or marketing script can address. Only an engaged, caring, customer-facing staff can handle these types of instances properly.
A highly-engaged employee typically feels more connected to the business and its performance. In fact, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, the level of employee engagement at companies that have achieved compound annual profit growth of at least 10 percent for a five-year period is more than 20 percent higher than at single-digit growth companies.
In addition to connecting customers with the right employees who are incented to fulfill their needs, companies realize other meaningful business benefits from having engaged workers. Employee turnover will be reduced, particularly in high-churn areas such as contact centers. HR costs will drop as companies have to devote less time and capital to recruiting new employees. That will also lead to lower training costs as companies retain longer-tenured, knowledgeable workers.
Nevertheless, the HR-related cost savings that stem from these actions pale in comparison to the impact that a highly engaged employee will have on cross-sell/upsell rates and other favorable business outcomes that result from happy, satisfied customers.

Employees are not equal
Just as companies need to treat different customers differently, they also must treat different employees differently. Not just in terms of compensation, but also how each employee responds uniquely to different styles of communication. They also have different needs and motivations; they each bring a different value proposition to the organization. Because of their unique qualities and capabilities, individual employees also require different types of training, acknowledgment, project assignments, and career progression paths. Some employees have a strong aptitude for assuaging customers who are upset. Other workers are adept at seizing opportunities for upselling customers at just the right time.
Decision-makers also need to recognize that there are roles within the organization where an employee’s impact is considerably greater than their rank or pay grade. For instance, contact center agents don’t rank among the highest-paid employees in most companies, yet their impact on the organization’s business outcomes with customers is substantial. Such groups should be identified and handled with special care.
While business leaders can’t necessarily pay contact center agents more, they can segment employees based on their skills or value to the organization and provide them with different types of incentives. These can include flex hours for working mothers or tuition support for workers attending night school. Incentives can also be tailored to meet an employee’s particular motivation. For instance, some employees value public recognition of their efforts by senior executives in town hall-type meetings.
Another effective technique for motivating and engaging employees is by placing them through a variety of rotational job assignments. This will give high-potential employees a chance to learn more about different parts of the organization while strengthening their skills, as well as the company’s bench strength.
There are also techniques that can be applied to help motivate and incent employees based on compensation levers. For example, companies can create special teams of contact center agents who are particularly adept at retaining high-risk customers. Agents who work in such groups can be compensated differently, including performance-based pay or bonuses that are tied to customer satisfaction and churn rates.
Applying the Golden Rule
When decision-makers take steps to motivate and incent their top-performing employees, they should be sure not to overlook their “B” team players whose contributions to the company are also critical. The best way to do this is by setting transparent performance and rewards criteria for all employees, including the availability of training programs and the requirements for reaching different pay levels. The criteria itself can be based on an employee’s performance grades and their direct and indirect influence on customer satisfaction scores.
Highly engaged and motivated employees are more likely to go above and beyond the call of duty for your company’s customers. Ultimately, that will lead to happier, more satisfied customers whose loyalty will be reflected in their business value to your company.
About the Author: Orkun Oguz is a managing partner at Peppers & Rogers Group.

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>Employee Engagement: Workers of the world, unite!

>

Karl Marx, the Division of Labor, and Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

One of the single most important elements of industrial efficiency and technical progress is the concept of “division of labor.” The original thesis behind division of labor was stated succinctly by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, with his classic description of the pin factory, where each task was divided into standardized steps to be completed more cost-efficiently by different people and machines. When an analogous principle is applied to nation-states we get the theory of comparative advantage, which underlies the benefits of free trade. Both division of labor and comparative advantage presume that people can perform separate tasks and then trade with each other for mutual benefit. Trading is critical. Without trading, among people and nation-states alike, progress is stunted.
By dividing labor and trading for mutual benefit we have now progressed to the point where virtually every artifact around us that is “man-made” can only be produced through the collective efforts of many, organized in a way that is far too complex for top-down management (or state planning), and using expertise that no single individual can possibly possess on his or her own. The economist Leonard Read may be most famous today for an essay he wrote more than 50 years ago to illustrate this point, using an ordinary wooden pencil as his example.

As simple as a pencil is, he says, “not a single person on the face of this earth” knows how to make it! Why? Just consider the task of harvesting the cedar wood for making the pencil, using saws and axes, ropes and other gear. Of course, you’d first have to mine and smelt the ore to make these tools, then raise and prepare the food to feed the lumberjacks, clear the land for a road, manufacture and assemble the flatcars or trucks that will ship the wood to the mill, and even pour the concrete for the hydroelectric dam to provide the mill’s power. You’d also have to travel to Sri Lanka to mine the graphite for the pencil’s core, mixing it with clay enriched with ammonium hydroxide, and then combining the mixture with wetting agents made from sulfonated tallow. Finally, you’d have to cut the graphite mixture to size, dry it and bake it at almost 2000 degrees Fahrenheit before treating it with a hot mixture composed of candelilla wax, paraffin, and hydrogenated natural fats. Read’s point is not just that no single human being could ever do all these things, but that no single human being even knows how to do all these things. No one. (Quick: Have you ever heard of candelilla wax or sulfonated tallow? Could you recognize graphite when it is in the ground, before being mined?)
Pin factory or lead pencils, in other words, division of labor and economic progress clearly go hand in hand.
But carried to its logical extreme, division of labor has a dark side as well. Frederick Taylor’s landmark theory of “scientific management” was famous for its controversial contention that the best laborer would be a tireless and unthinking automaton.
Enter Stage Left: Karl Marx. More than 150 years ago he suggested that sooner or later workers of the world would unite against their capitalist oppressors. One of the reasons he gave for this prediction was that specialized work was alienating. Marx believed that workers who were tasked with doing repetitive, uniform tasks became disconnected not only from the completed products that would give their work meaning, but from themselves and from their essence as human beings, as well. Today, we would say that such workers are “disengaged” in their work. “Engagement” is one of those fashionable management terms that can have a range of exact meaning, but Hay Group’s definition of employee engagement is good enough: “a result achieved by stimulating employees’ enthusiasm for their work and directing it toward organizational success.”
Division of labor, scientific management and the alienation of the worker are all concepts that pre-date information technology. The modern production process doesn’t need efficient workers to be automatons, robotically inserting Tab A into Slot B eight hours a day at the pin factory in order to collect their pay. This is something easily automated. But technology is a two-edged sword. When we aren’t conscious of the human need to be engaged and interested in the work to be done, technology can alienate even the information worker. Dan Ariely, in his new book The Upside of Irrationality, tells an interesting story of his own research assistant, Jay. Jay is an information worker, in that he spends most of his day managing Ariely’s research projects and budgets. But according to Ariely,

“…accounting software he used daily required him to fill in numerous fields on the appropriate electronic forms, sending these e-forms to other people, who filled in a few more fields, who in turn sent the e-forms to someone else, who approved the expenses and subsequently passed them to yet another person, who actually settled the accounts. Not only was poor Jay doing only a small part of a relatively meaningless task, but he never had the satisfaction of seeing this work completed.”

When it is used more thoughtfully, however, technology also allows us to re-integrate the mechanical tasks assigned to individual people, engaging them in their work and improving their enthusiasm and output simultaneously. When a customer service representative is allowed to handle a complaint as a “case” to be tracked from first call to final resolution, for instance, or when a line engineer at an automobile assembly plant suggests a better way to handle a technical support process – these are both examples of how labor is being re-integrated. It is information technology and the increasingly efficient electronic connections we make with others that allow this to happen. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, in their book Wikinomics, suggest that ubiquitous electronic connectivity is changing the very nature of work, making it “more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography.” Because of this, they suggest, firms are decentralizing their decision making, relying more and more on individual initiative and responsibility.
Another way to view this is that computer technology now allows us to divide labor not by the rote, physical steps involved in manufacturing and assembly, but by the actual planning and decision-making processes involved in managing these steps. In effect, rather than just trading physical tasks and manual skills with each other to improve productivity, we are using technology to trade ideas and insights to improve productivity. And our rate of technological progress and economic growth is accelerating as we continue to move “up market” with the division-of-labor concept.
So, as social media tools allow ever more pervasive, immediate, and complex communication and collaboration among people, it may be that the ultimate form of “division of labor” is not turning people into alienated automatons at all. Instead, it will eventually involve replacing hierarchical, top-down organizations with self-organized social groups of individuals, each pursuing a commonly agreed set of goals. We can catch glimpses of this future now, from large companies such as Cisco and ExxonMobil flattening their organization charts to push decision-making down down down, to retailers and up-and-coming firms such as Best Buy and Zappos encouraging their individual employees to use their Twitter accounts to distribute the customer-service task more effectively.
Workers of the world, unite!

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>Employee Engagement: Workers of the world, unite!

>

Karl Marx, the Division of Labor, and Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

One of the single most important elements of industrial efficiency and technical progress is the concept of “division of labor.” The original thesis behind division of labor was stated succinctly by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, with his classic description of the pin factory, where each task was divided into standardized steps to be completed more cost-efficiently by different people and machines. When an analogous principle is applied to nation-states we get the theory of comparative advantage, which underlies the benefits of free trade. Both division of labor and comparative advantage presume that people can perform separate tasks and then trade with each other for mutual benefit. Trading is critical. Without trading, among people and nation-states alike, progress is stunted.
By dividing labor and trading for mutual benefit we have now progressed to the point where virtually every artifact around us that is “man-made” can only be produced through the collective efforts of many, organized in a way that is far too complex for top-down management (or state planning), and using expertise that no single individual can possibly possess on his or her own. The economist Leonard Read may be most famous today for an essay he wrote more than 50 years ago to illustrate this point, using an ordinary wooden pencil as his example.

As simple as a pencil is, he says, “not a single person on the face of this earth” knows how to make it! Why? Just consider the task of harvesting the cedar wood for making the pencil, using saws and axes, ropes and other gear. Of course, you’d first have to mine and smelt the ore to make these tools, then raise and prepare the food to feed the lumberjacks, clear the land for a road, manufacture and assemble the flatcars or trucks that will ship the wood to the mill, and even pour the concrete for the hydroelectric dam to provide the mill’s power. You’d also have to travel to Sri Lanka to mine the graphite for the pencil’s core, mixing it with clay enriched with ammonium hydroxide, and then combining the mixture with wetting agents made from sulfonated tallow. Finally, you’d have to cut the graphite mixture to size, dry it and bake it at almost 2000 degrees Fahrenheit before treating it with a hot mixture composed of candelilla wax, paraffin, and hydrogenated natural fats. Read’s point is not just that no single human being could ever do all these things, but that no single human being even knows how to do all these things. No one. (Quick: Have you ever heard of candelilla wax or sulfonated tallow? Could you recognize graphite when it is in the ground, before being mined?)
Pin factory or lead pencils, in other words, division of labor and economic progress clearly go hand in hand.
But carried to its logical extreme, division of labor has a dark side as well. Frederick Taylor’s landmark theory of “scientific management” was famous for its controversial contention that the best laborer would be a tireless and unthinking automaton.
Enter Stage Left: Karl Marx. More than 150 years ago he suggested that sooner or later workers of the world would unite against their capitalist oppressors. One of the reasons he gave for this prediction was that specialized work was alienating. Marx believed that workers who were tasked with doing repetitive, uniform tasks became disconnected not only from the completed products that would give their work meaning, but from themselves and from their essence as human beings, as well. Today, we would say that such workers are “disengaged” in their work. “Engagement” is one of those fashionable management terms that can have a range of exact meaning, but Hay Group’s definition of employee engagement is good enough: “a result achieved by stimulating employees’ enthusiasm for their work and directing it toward organizational success.”
Division of labor, scientific management and the alienation of the worker are all concepts that pre-date information technology. The modern production process doesn’t need efficient workers to be automatons, robotically inserting Tab A into Slot B eight hours a day at the pin factory in order to collect their pay. This is something easily automated. But technology is a two-edged sword. When we aren’t conscious of the human need to be engaged and interested in the work to be done, technology can alienate even the information worker. Dan Ariely, in his new book The Upside of Irrationality, tells an interesting story of his own research assistant, Jay. Jay is an information worker, in that he spends most of his day managing Ariely’s research projects and budgets. But according to Ariely,

“…accounting software he used daily required him to fill in numerous fields on the appropriate electronic forms, sending these e-forms to other people, who filled in a few more fields, who in turn sent the e-forms to someone else, who approved the expenses and subsequently passed them to yet another person, who actually settled the accounts. Not only was poor Jay doing only a small part of a relatively meaningless task, but he never had the satisfaction of seeing this work completed.”

When it is used more thoughtfully, however, technology also allows us to re-integrate the mechanical tasks assigned to individual people, engaging them in their work and improving their enthusiasm and output simultaneously. When a customer service representative is allowed to handle a complaint as a “case” to be tracked from first call to final resolution, for instance, or when a line engineer at an automobile assembly plant suggests a better way to handle a technical support process – these are both examples of how labor is being re-integrated. It is information technology and the increasingly efficient electronic connections we make with others that allow this to happen. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, in their book Wikinomics, suggest that ubiquitous electronic connectivity is changing the very nature of work, making it “more cognitively complex, more team-based and collaborative, more dependent on social skills, more time pressured, more reliant on technological competence, more mobile, and less dependent on geography.” Because of this, they suggest, firms are decentralizing their decision making, relying more and more on individual initiative and responsibility.
Another way to view this is that computer technology now allows us to divide labor not by the rote, physical steps involved in manufacturing and assembly, but by the actual planning and decision-making processes involved in managing these steps. In effect, rather than just trading physical tasks and manual skills with each other to improve productivity, we are using technology to trade ideas and insights to improve productivity. And our rate of technological progress and economic growth is accelerating as we continue to move “up market” with the division-of-labor concept.
So, as social media tools allow ever more pervasive, immediate, and complex communication and collaboration among people, it may be that the ultimate form of “division of labor” is not turning people into alienated automatons at all. Instead, it will eventually involve replacing hierarchical, top-down organizations with self-organized social groups of individuals, each pursuing a commonly agreed set of goals. We can catch glimpses of this future now, from large companies such as Cisco and ExxonMobil flattening their organization charts to push decision-making down down down, to retailers and up-and-coming firms such as Best Buy and Zappos encouraging their individual employees to use their Twitter accounts to distribute the customer-service task more effectively.
Workers of the world, unite!

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!