Category: Employee Engagement

Customer experience – why designing the employee journey matters

Posted on by Daniel Castro

We are truly living in the age of customer-centricity. Across the world, more and more organisations are waking up to the idea that only by focusing every business effort on the benefit it can bring to the customer can prosperity be achieved, and demise avoided. Here’s a pithy statistic from customer experience agency Walker to back it up: by 2020, customer experience will have overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator. Just let that sink in – the quality of the product you sell, and the price you charge for it, are both less important than the customer experience associated with it. 

It’s a global mindset shift for businesses, and it’s one that here at The Storytellers we have helped our diverse portfolio of clients with countless times. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a story that we have worked on with our clients over the last five years that has not had customer-centricity as a key element of the mindset-shift that leaders want to see. It makes complete sense: if a customer-centric business is the aim, you need employees to have a clear and unambiguous view of what that means for them. After all, it’s the employees (customer-facing or not) who will deliver that experience.

So how can businesses ensure that their leaders are just as dedicated to the employee journey, as they expect them to be to the customer journey?

Fundamentally, the starting point is to approach the employee journey with the same dedication as the customer journey. So this means focusing just as much on how key messages are communicated, understood and reinforced, as it does what the content of those messages is. User experience is a key concept in the customer experience – it stands to reason that these principles should also apply when it comes to the employee experience too.

It sounds simple, but it’s an essential point. If businesses want to deliver great customer experiences, it’s the employees who will deliver those. If businesses want employees to come on board with this new approach, leaders need to win hearts and minds in much the same way that they go about making customers love their offering. They are certainly different stakeholders with different needs – but the process of understanding, communication and engagement should be consistent for both in terms of effort and quality.

Therefore, what can we take from customer experience principles when thinking about the employee journey? How can we creatively and meticulously bring that employee journey to life? 

Firstly, defining the overarching business Narrative is critical. Achieving leadership alignment around a shared strategic narrative, establishing the key goals, agreeing them at the executive level and setting tangible measures provides a solid base to work from and sets the correct expectations for everything that follows. The notion of inspiring people in the journey that a business is on is crucial – and starting with a vision of this that is aligned at the most senior level is a vital component in helping employees to think customer-centrically.

Next, just as a business would do with customers, it’s important to get a strong grasp of the Identity of the employees across the organisation. Persona research, employee surveys, focus groups – they all provide key insights that shine a light on the different kinds of people that need to be appealed to, and helps begin to answer that vital question: ‘what’s in this for me?’ Without this kind of activity, it’s much more likely that employees will see new initiatives as something that is happening to them, rather than something they are truly a part of. It’s in making this kind of listening exercise a part of the initiative from the beginning that employees will see a change in their own journey, before they embark on changing their approach to the customer journey. Again: these are UX principles that take time and effort to apply… but if you truly believe that it’s your employees who will deliver the very best experience for your customers, isn’t this something worth investing in?

Understanding the different identities in a business, and taking the time to ask people how they feel, what they want, and where the pain points are, are all key to understanding the correct Emotion to channel. It’s important to create a unified sense of emotion at the organisation-wide level of a business – but understanding the emotional journey that employees are on at the more specific persona level is much more likely to yield positive results. Better empathy and understanding is crucial to the notion of customer-centricity: a better understanding of your own employees at an emotional level is a requisite to increasing their own empathic skills when it comes to the customer. As a leader, it’s a must if you want your key messages to land – you have to be emotionally literate when it comes to your people if you want them to follow you.

Finally, once these various insights have been gathered, it is crucial to closely examine the Communication that exists within the organisation, in order to consider what the key touch points and channels will be. In terms of achieving a company-wide movement of change in support of a more customer-centric approach, this is crucial in demonstrating the kind of user-focused approach that is sought for customers. It’s not enough to just roll out a message at the leadership level through a handful of channels as a one-off activity. Consistent, tailored messaging according to the research and insights that have been gathered is far more likely to deliver a lasting mindset shift.

Understanding a business journey through these four lenses is useful on a number of levels – using them from the perspective of user experience to design the employee journey is an enormously valuable process to drive deeper engagement in an employee base. 

But what happens when the situation is more complicated than this? We often see two scenarios played out.

The first is when the organisation is large, complex, diverse and across several geographies. When this is the case, we often hear of a need to reinforce the brand culture, along with the headline need to create a better customer experience. In this kind of instance, we have especially seen the benefit of engaging Executive leaders throughout the communication process. This serves a number of benefits:

  • Firstly, bringing the C-suite into the design stage of a communication roll-out builds in a level of authenticity that cannot be achieved by just bringing them in at the end. Authentic, personal and emotional Executive communication sends a message to the entire organisation that the leadership are interested in a dialogue, not one-way communication.
  • Secondly, this approach entails the C-suite speaking honestly and personally on the role that they play in the journey. Doing this establishes the causal relationship between the strategic narrative and the idea of ‘what this means for me’. Creating this tangible sense of what needs to happen is critical, and this needs to start with leaders accepting and speaking to their own responsibilities on this journey.
  • Finally, those leaders begin to role-model the behaviours that they are looking for, especially at the next layer of leadership – communicating in a way that is personal, understanding of the audience they are speaking to, and actively living the company values.

So doubling down on the detail around communication roll-out is key when it comes to larger, more diverse organisations. Weaving in the next layer of leadership into the design process, making them a part of the solution and leveraging their insights is one way to mitigate those risks.

As businesses continue to develop their customer-centric approaches, we know that employees must be given the motivation, means and momentum to see these objectives through. In pursuit of a strong brand culture that champions great customer experiences, give your employees the same attention, focus and care as you do your customers – and you can expect them to do the same.

Want more engaged employees? Tell a story

Posted on by Jack Roberts

Every leader wants the best from their team. We know of a way to engage and unite your team, accelerate performance, and inspire your employees all at the same time. We are watching companies become the best versions of themselves every day and it starts with something simple that requires your attention. We’ve seen organisations rally behind seemingly impossible journeys.

With turnover rates and the cost of turnover rates higher than ever1, as leaders we must do more than foster a culture that stays engaged. We have to create it. We have to shape our story around it. It is no secret that it can be difficult to shift the culture of a company. To do so requires a change in the mindsets of our employees. Just take the recent moves at Microsoft to engender a growth mindset into the company’s DNA.2

We’ve found that it takes the power and influence of storytelling to make a real shift and create lasting change. Yes, story, the thing that tucked us in at night, entertains us when we tell ourselves, “just one more episode and then I’m going to bed.”

Did you know that storytelling is good for our bodies, too? It both physiologically and psychologically makes us happier. According to multiple studies of the mind, good stories can physically release the ‘love’ and ‘happiness’ hormone oxytocin in our brains.3 In one particular study published by the Harvard Business Review, Dr. Paul Zak and his lab studied the oxytocin levels of their participants as they were exposed to different forms of narrative storytelling and found that a character-driven story did cause more happiness hormone synthesis.4 The study also revealed that oxytocin production was directly correlated to how much a participant was willing to help others. This means the better the story – particularly where there is an element of struggle or endeavour that’s been overcome – the more engaged your employee. And leaders can use this tool to great advantage, to build empathy and trust amongst their teams in order to bring them with them on challenging journeys of change and performance improvement.

What would this be like? To experience work like we were living a great story? Like we were a part of something bigger than ourselves? A happier employee is far less likely to leave during your next wave of changes, dropping those turnover rates and their many costs. It also brings a renewed energy into your business and that impossible journey seems possible. One of our key learnings has been that authentic leaders, equipped with the the right story for their goals, their strategies, and their business, have a huge impact. We’ve watched teams achieve goals that only months before were discounted. We’ve seen people retract their resignations. We’ve seen attrition drop – often dramatically – together with absenteeism levels that are so often a symptom of disengagement.

Most importantly we’ve seen leaders embrace change and inspire truly remarkable stories. Because the secret is that its not always a culture problem or an operations problem, but a story problem. Indeed, our professional culture is a collection of stories our employees believe about our company.

At The Storytellers, we are watching renewal as our crafted storytelling inspires sustainable productivity, unites disparate teams, and accelerates individual and team performance alike. The change a good story makes sticks. Because, the simple truth is that people remember stories before facts.5

What could you accomplish if your employees really knew what you were building, how you were building it, and why? What could be created if everyone was inspired by what you were working towards? At The Storytellers this is the change we are creating for our clients. We are helping people make the impossible possible by telling a better story. We’ll help you give your employees the journey they need to give you the results you want.

At The Storytellers we build those journeys.

 

 

1. Hinkin, T. R., & Tracey, J. B. (2000). The cost of turnover: Putting a price on the learning curve. Link

2. Weinberger, Matt. (2017). How Microsoft’s CEO Showed His Employees Tough Love. Link

3. Stillman, Jessica. (2016). The Fascinating Thing That Storytelling Does to Your Brain. Link

4. Zak, Paul Dr. (2014). Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling. Link to source. Link

5. Callahan, Shawn. (2015). The Link Between Memory and Stories. Link

Two Years’ Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

Our new research reveals that three-quarters of business leaders believe their company won’t survive beyond the next two years unless they put more focus on customers. Yet, astonishingly, nearly half have got ‘more important business issues to focus on.’

‘Two Years’ Warning: The Customer Centricity Crisis‘ exposes the mindsets that exist around customer centricity in the world’s largest organisations, and the disconnect in attitude and beliefs between leaders and employees. Our study finds that leaders are paralysed by the changes required, and are failing to build companies fit for today’s increasingly demanding customers.

Read more

Let’s be honest: four ways of winning over your cynics in times of change

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

There’s no doubt about it. Storytelling is an immensely powerful weapon in times of change and uncertainty. It can change mindsets, alter people’s belief systems and inspire people to follow where they may not ever have considered following before.

But how can you win the hearts and minds of hardened cynics and sceptics during times of intense change (think middle management)? The answer – or at least part of the answer – is ‘be honest’. I recently read a great article in Harvard Business Review, which inspired me to write about honesty and credibility when creating and engaging people in your strategic narrative.

Too many leaders start their strategic narrative by painting a wonderful vision for the future.  They go on to weave a fantastical story of what lies ahead, and the great things that they are going to achieve together. Inspiring? Yes. Credible? Not always, particularly for companies which have been going through painful change. That’s not to say that an inspiring vision isn’t important, of course (and often we open our leadership meetings with a short but powerful film that makes a fleeting reference to the vision) – it’s just that you need to be careful about its positioning.

So why isn’t it credible? The reason is fourfold.

Firstly, painting a glorious vision of the future, when all people have been experiencing is pressure, confusion, waves of redundancy, losing colleagues, bosses, and are being expected to adopt completely new ways of working, is not necessarily the best place to start your story. People cannot connect their own experiences to it. They can’t connect to it in a meaningful way. It’s a distant land of milk and honey in which they can’t even begin to imagine themselves living when the present and immediate future still holds a good deal of uncertainty, sense of loss, fatigue and fear. You risk turning them off from the start, and getting them back ‘in the zone’ and envisioning a future state can be a real challenge.

What’s important is to reconnect people to why they joined the organisation in the first place; remind them of the pride they once held and the higher, motivating and emotionally compelling purpose of why the organisation exists. This will enable people to move out of their current state of instability, even if temporarily, to reconnect with the organisation in a real way. It enables them to recapture the moments which inspired them to want to work there in the first place, and lifts them into a more positive place. Like a good marriage counsellor, you are asking them to remember what attracted them to you before things went awry. ‘Remember the good times?’ It needs to be real. From the outset.

Secondly, your story needs a burning platform – a case for change. This needs to be an acknowledgement of what’s really going on out there: a reality check which clearly articulates the threat to the business and the risk it’s facing should it not change. It may not be comfortable. It may even feel like an ice-bath after the warmth of the bit where we talked about pride and purpose. Again, this makes things real. This part of your story could be a reference to the external forces which are driving change, such as competition, changing consumer behaviours, legislation or the competitive environment. It may be an honest statement about the fact that we’re not performing at our best. Or, as we have experienced with many a client, it’s an opportunity for the senior management team to acknowledge the pain the business has collectively been experiencing. In some cases, even to acknowledge their own role they have played in ‘not getting it right’. Every story needs an antagonist or ‘baddie’ in it, and this element of the current reality should appear early on in your narrative, warts and all. Be honest. If you’re not, people just won’t believe you and will continue to resist. The cynics need to hear this honesty – not just a few hours of corporate rhetoric.

Thirdly, in telling your story, you need to allow people to interrogate it. As much as they ‘get it’ rationally, there may well be tough questions as they start to process and internalise the content. They need to see a visibly united senior leadership team who are speaking as one. They need to be able to ask those questions to dispel any sense of whitewash or brushing under the carpet. People need to feel that their pain has been acknowledged. That they have a voice. That they’re being listened to. If you aren’t honest and if you don’t allow these moments of interrogation and questioning, you will find that people just put their heads down, tut, roll their eyes, put up their metaphorical umbrella and wait for the shower to pass so they can get on with what they were doing before. They also need time to work out what it means to them before they go on to communicate it with their teams.

Lastly, don’t make your story a piece of fantasy or a metaphor. ‘Once upon a time, there was a wizard that lived in a far-off land’ immediately makes cynics want to vomit. Sorry, but keeping it real and grounding your strategic journey in reality by illustrating your messages with real facts, proof points and anecdotes about colleagues and customers which create an emotional connection is the route to believability. People can imagine themselves in the situation. They may have even experienced such situations themselves. In this way you are creating a credible, honest and real articulation of your strategic journey of change that people can empathise with and see the part they can play.

If they can’t relate to it, they will continue to feel that change is being ‘done to them.’ They’ll feel like victims rather than heroes, resistant rather than compliant. And, cynic or not, everyone wants to be a hero.

A C-suite narrative: context and influence

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

A piece of research by McKinsey* suggests that nearly half of top executives say they struggled to earn support for their ideas when they transitioned to a C-suite role.

They reflected that they weren’t successful at aligning others around their early objectives. In an environment where early decisions can define the success of an executives tenure and ideas are vying for priority, context is vital to build support. A strategic narrative provides a unique type of context. It provides reassurance, it reaffirms value and rigorously sense-checks new suggestions against carefully selected criteria. Consequently, ideas that tackle the big challenges the narrative identifies, pursue a defined strategy and support desired behaviours and values are now prioritised and fully supported. They have context – they are in service of a vision of a better future that every member of that senior team has committed to realising.

One of the foundations of our programme is aligning Boards around their business journey. This is often one of the most powerful sessions in a typical programme – uncovering issues that are preventing progress, establishing priorities, building conviction and uniting a senior leadership team. Every decision made around the Board table now reinforces a powerful vision and ideas are contributing to a defined business journey.

The study highlights the importance of creating a shared vision and underlines the dangers of an misaligned executive. Those who responded cited this as the most important transition activity. Naturally such a powerful and influential tool isn’t easy to create – only thirty percent thought creating a shared vision was easy in their new role.

* “Ascending to the C-suite”, McKinsey & Company, 2015

Is employee engagement a fad? Maybe. But does it matter?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

I went to a stimulating discussion event earlier this week at the Groucho Club in London, hosted by Engage for Change. The event took the format of a debate. The resolution? ‘Employee engagement is just another management fad’.

An audience poll at the beginning revealed around one third to be in agreement that employee engagement is nothing more than a fad. And in the end, the speakers in the ‘yes’ camp apparently won some converts. About two thirds of the raised arms were in support of the resolution.

The sad thing is, even if employee engagement is a fad, it’s not much of one. The ’employee engagement crowd’ can at times be quite far from C-suite execs. The concepts of employee engagement and its relevance to business performance can seem self-evident to its advocates in HR and organisational development circles, but they often struggle to gain an audience with those at the top of organisational hierarchies. A fad implies that everyone’s trying to get a piece of it, and that’s just not happening right now.

And here’s another problem: what’s the opposite of a fad? Surely something that’s not a fad would be concrete and obviously meaningful. Employee engagement, on the other hand, lacks anything resembling an agreed definition. David MacLeod’s report identified 50+ going definitions. Perhaps executives’ reluctance to engage with employee engagement stems in part from the fact that no one really knows exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about employee engagement.

But, at the risk of sounding a bit mystical, just because we can’t define something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You can argue over whether increasing employee engagement is worthwhile, or even possible. You can debate whether engagement is a means to an end (i.e. business performance) or an end in itself (i.e. the normative argument that employees should have positive feelings towards their work). But you can’t really argue that it isn’t a good thing (whatever ‘it’ is, exactly).

At its worst, employee engagement is nothing more than a manufactured “dark art that gives HR people something to do”, as one speaker put it. But that of course is a very limited vision of what engagement is all about. As we continue to discover in our work, there are so many things that affect how an employee feels about his or her working life, and it’s not something any single department can take on on its own. It’s not the narrowness of employee engagement as ‘just’ an HR function that keeps employee engagement from flourishing, but rather the breadth of the challenges is presents.

In our work, we’ve seen over and over again the transformative power of getting an organisation’s people genuinely behind a new initiative, new behaviours or new ways of working. Our goals aren’t simply to increase engagement—that’s a by-product—but rather to make the organisation seem more human, leaders to become more authentic, goals to become more realistic, to allow people to collaborate and discover better ways of working. These are just some of the aspects that inform whether employees are engaged, and it varies immensely from company to company. So I’d in fact agree, at least in part, with the resolution. Employee engagement is faddish in its vagueness. It’s not nearly enough to just say ‘we need to increase our employee engagement’. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of things companies can and should do that will end up doing just that.

For a more thorough breakdown of the arguments presented at the event, check out Gloria Lombardi’s excellent write-up. And for a rousing employee engagement call to arms, check out the RSA’s Matthew Taylor in his 2013 lecture (researched by yours truly).

People may soon be leaving their jobs in droves. What can be done?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

The accreditation body Investors in People recently released their annual employee sentiment poll, and the results should be at least a little alarming for all UK employers. The number of workers who are actively seeking a new job at the moment has risen by 10 percent over last year.

You’d be right to attribute some of this increase to a greater sense of confidence in the labour market. People who were unhappily stuck in their jobs because they felt they couldn’t find a new one are now feeling increasingly able to move on. And this is good for employers and employees alike, since neither side benefits when employees’ hearts and minds aren’t in it.

But that only partly explains it. While 10 percent more—now almost a quarter of all employees—actively seeking a new job, and 34 percent (up 5 percent from last year) “considering” a new job, the proportion of employees who feel the job market has improved from 2014 has risen only by 6 percent. In other words, the number of people looking for a new job has risen faster than the number of people who feel confident in their ability to find one.

This is most true in professional services and telecoms, and particularly true of workers in London.

Why is this happening?

Not surprisingly, one of the major drivers of dissatisfaction in work is pay. But there’s one even greater reason employees are looking for new gigs: the quality of management. Almost half, 46 percent, of those unhappy in their job cite poor management as a key reason, while only 44 percent cite low pay. And a similarly large number of people, 38 percent, complain they don’t feel valued as a member of staff.

 

Investors in People are calling this a “job exodus time bomb”, and they’re right.

Clearly, companies can do better. And unless they want to suffer the cost and turmoil of massive staff turnover, they will need to. And there’s an strong connection between feeling valued as a member of staff and feeling positive about the quality of management. As psychologist Dan Pink has argued, and as these statistics confirm, three key drivers of satisfaction of work are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Good-quality leadership will allow all these to flourish within the organisation.

Leaders must give their people a sense of where the organisation is going, what it’s accomplishing, and how individuals play a crucial role. That way they will come to feel they are heroes of the journey, rather than passive victims of it.

Feeling like a number?

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

There seem to be many consultancies and operational experts who take the view that businesses function purely as systems. To improve the business, the logic goes, you must make the system more efficient. Cut out waste, grease the cogs, make everything more predictable.

Efficiency certainly has its place, but I wonder whether the days when businesses could get a clear competitive edge through operational improvements alone are behind us.

Take the example of Ford Motor Company. It made radical innovations in vehicle assembly, which put it far ahead of its competitors. But businesses now operate on a much more level playing field – with similar rules, market access, products and methodologies.

These shifts that have taken place allow us to see the roles of people and the roles of business systems as separate but complementary. Systems and technology have freed people from tasks related to implementing the system, allowing them instead to refocus their efforts on creating valuable experiences for customers. The question shouldn’t be ‘How can humans compete with robots?’ but rather ‘How can we quit trying to make humans and robots share the same roles?’ What seems to allow a business to distinguish itself from competitors today is its degree of human engagement – the extent to which people apply their own discretionary effort to the needs of the business.

For most companies in the globalised economy of the 21st century, drawing out the ingenuity held within their people should be a core leadership priority. The clients whom we’ve helped to achieve the greatest success in fostering behaviour change have been those who understand this approach, and who are willing to invest in their people in order to stimulate their discretionary effort and willingness to change. This cannot happen when employees feel their jobs are just one technological advance away from redundancy. We are approached by many organisations facing acute change challenges that they know revolve around the engagement of their people in strategic change – and not just in improving systems.

“Showing our guests that we care”

Posted on by Nailia Tasseel

It’s no great revelation to say that storytelling forms an essential part of who we are, but the role stories play in an institutional setting is only beginning to be understood. Stories are not just a form of communication. As important as such issues as strategy, performance and market placement are, human engagement – the stories of change, empathy, human endeavour and success – plays a vital role in fortunes of the business. These are the stories that engage, motivate and inspire people, and will help create a powerful emotional connection to the business and the journey it’s on. And with emotional connection comes fertile ground for improvement and change.

A great example of this emotional connection played out at a leadership conference we once organised for a global hotel brand. To illustrate one of its strategic priorities — “showing our guests that we care” — one of the delegates, the general manager of a hotel branch, stood up and shared a story. He recalled a time when a father and his sick son were visiting his hotel. They were popular regulars, as the medical centre treating his son was nearby. The night before the son’s chemotherapy began, his father explained to the restaurant staff that his son had decided to shave his head from the outset. And to support him, his father had decided to follow suit.

His request to the head waiter was that when they appeared the following morning for breakfast, that the wait staff didn’t pass comment or react openly to their shaved heads, for fear of embarrassing his son at what was to be the start of a very challenging period of his life.

When they arrived for breakfast, nobody in the room batted an eyelid nor said a word. Four of the waiters, however, had shaved their heads too. Needless to say, many people in that conference were reduced to tears of both pride and empathy as the story was told, and the story is still being told in the organisation to reinforce the fact that they care. And that’s what caring for guests looks and feels like.