This blog is about the relationship between organizations and the people who work for them. And, it’s dedicated to the millions of people around the world who go to work every day wanting to do a great job.
Customer
What’s the value of a good relationship?
Being open. Being collaborative. Being innovative. We all say this is a good thing. But how does being open, collaborative, innovative add value to your organization?
The focus on social media – the tools and tactics – is taking us away from this more important question.
What’s the value of a good relationship to your organization? Here’s a conversation between Charlene Li and Gary Hamel.
What’s a good relationship look like? with your employees? your customers? your supply chain? your board? And what’s the value of that relationship to the business. Is anyone in your organization is really thinking about that?
Random Posts:
It’s about the system. It’s about balance.
Today’s inspiration comes from C-Notes. The question posed was [and I’m paraphrasing]: As you design the customer experience do you think about it from a system point of view? Do you think about the balance?
I don’t think we do. And, we do even less of this kind of thinking when we start talking about the employee experience. We don’t seem to have/or take the time to really understand these relationships, the kind of experience we want them to have and the implications that would have on what and how we do things.
It’s the kind of process that takes up front thinking. It takes time. And it can challenge all kinds of preconceived notions and assumptions. This kind of thoughtful and intentional orientation to organizational change is much more like walking a labyrinth – all be it one on steroids – than any linear change model would ever suggest.
And in my experience, very few organizations have the will to really think it through; to back up and understand what they are trying to do and the implications that has on their organization and the communities around them. But when they do what happens next is amazing. Teams gain deeper understanding. Decisions that were written in stone are reversed or adjusted. Opportunities open up that had never existed or been explored. Barriers disappear. Things change for the better; for employees, for customers and for investors.
Has your organization got what it takes for this kind of conversation?
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On being professional
It’s sometimes easy to think that the professions – doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects – are the only fields that have professionals.
Today, our roofers finally arrived. We’re at the top of a 4-story condo facing winter in Montreal with a 21 year old peaked roof. To say we were glad to see them is an understatement.
It’s been a couple of months since we signed our agreement. Our contact has kept us in the loop [read managed our expectations] in terms of timing and weather issues, etc. Yesterday he called to say that the team would start today at 7:30am. Hallelujah.
They arrived at 6:45 and were ready to go at 7:30. Immaculate truck. Immaculate equipment. Hard hats and safety gear in place. One guy – the yellow hard hat guy – clearly in charge. They built a scaffold up the side of the building in record time. A truck with a hoist long enough to lift the materials up to the roof in place and ready to go.
We went out for a walk – there’s not much they can do about the noise so we might as well get a little exercise in… As we left, the shingles and other materials were being delivered to the roof. By the time we’d come back, they’d created a 4-story shoot to carry all the debris down to a huge container. On the roof they’d started pulling up the old shingles and piling them in one place on the lower level [it’s got two levels]. There one guy was in place at the top of the shoot. His job to make sure it all made it down the shoot to the container.
This team is more professional than many corporate teams I’ve seen. They’re doing what they said they were going to do when they said they’d do it. It’s obvious from here that each of them has a role knows what it is and has what they need to do it. And, you get a feeling that they take pride in the work they do. They also do it with joy [and a little fun – there have been a few good laughs from up there].
And, unless I am sorely mistaken by the end of the day tomorrow we’re going to have the best roof on the street.
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Something’s in the air
There’s something in the air and it’s not just that crisp smell of a Canadian fall. I’m noticing more than the usual reflection on what’s not working in organizations and how to fix it. And, there’s not just more reflection, it seems deeper and maybe even profound.
Many of the themes are very familiar for those of you who follow this blog and/or my friends at CommScrum:
- Think and act from the inside-out.
- Take a system rather than a functional or professional view
- Stop thinking that communications is about crafting and pushing messages
- Get out of your cubicle, off the executive floor and learn from employees and others outside your function/profession
- Empathize. Bring a deep human understanding to your profession.
Have I missed any?
Today I followed a talk that brings many of these ideas together and takes us someplace new. Standby.
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From the inside looking out
Earlier in my career I worked for one of the most admired brands in Canada. It’s the kind of thing that makes you proud. You walk into any situation and people are all over you about how great it must be. Except it wasn’t. The buzz and hype had created an external brand that didn’t match the internal reality.
What brings this to mind is that two more of the world’s most powerful and valued brands have taken big hits to their reputations in the past few weeks. And both of them for misleading customers.
DELL is accused of hiding significant and potentially dangerous technical issues from their business customers. Recently unsealed lawsuit documents reveal cover-up and purposeful deception that may have gone on for years.
Apple’s iphone customers have complained of dropped calls since the first iphone hit the market. They were told it was a network problem. A small problem of design which meant you just had to hold it a certain way. Then a software problem. Now, according to consumer reports the phone’s hardware is flawed. And it looks like Apple may have known about this problem for some time.
The thing is when we say DELL and Apple knew and have been misleading customers, we mean DELL and Apple employees knew and have been misleading customers. Certainly not all employees new. But, most certainly some of them did. And, no doubt many of them suspected the truth.
What’s it like to be on the inside of brands like these? To know that the customer’s brand experience is build in whole or in part on a myth. To know that if anyone really took a look behind the curtain they’d find behaviours that were questionable if not unethical or illegal. To know that your boss or your colleague is misleading you?
Rising employee cynicism and plummeting trust in leadership tell the tale. So the next time you’re asked how communications can help reverse these trends don’t start drafting new and better messages to push. Stop yourself from building a inspiring internal campaign or refreshing the intranet. Do start thinking about how you can help set the conditions for getting the right conversations going with the right people around where and how the employee experience is not aligned with the brand and discovering what needs to change.
Some additional reading
I went to see if I could find the values statements for DELL and Apple. Read in the context of what is in the news now, they are pretty interesting.
- Check out Dell’s official ‘Soul of Dell’
- Apples doesn’t publish its values statement on the web, but I did find a pdf post that looks pretty credible. If the actual values statement “customer empathy” is especially chilling.
And, I’ve been following the animated discussion on the smoke and mirrors of employer branding with Sean Trainor at CIPR Inside that adds another dimension to this post.
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Friendly. Not familiar.
There’s been a lot of talk about making organizations more human from a customer point of view lately. I think the most recent iteration of this idea has been inspired by Design Thinking and the role of empathy in customer relationships [thanks Dan Gray and the gang at CommScrum for getting me reading this literature].
The idea is that if you really understand and care about your customers and show it you can build long-term sustainable relationships with them. Not exactly breakthrough thinking.
Anyway it’s not the idea that’s bad. The idea’s fantastic. And there are organizations that do it and do it well. It’s authentically who they are. The problem starts when not particularly nice organizations decide they are going to institutionalize niceness. And, a recent post by Julien Smith got me thinking about something that had just happened to me.
A story. I called my bank about something a few weeks ago and the person on the end of the phone asked if she could call me Deborah [a little familiar] and then began using my name in every second sentence. Then she asked if she could wish me happy birthday… it was the next week. I felt completely creeped me out.
My grandmother ran her own business successfully for years. Her mantra: “Be friendly. Not familiar.” This clearly broke that rule. This woman didn’t know me. I didn’t know her. I wasn’t calling for a personal relationship with her. I wanted to complete a transaction with the institution. This was simply a pretence of friendly. It was manipulative. She knew it and I knew it.
And this got me thinking about what it must be like to be an employee in an organization that’s decided it’s time to be warm and friendly with customers when the organization has never been warm and friendly before.
Imagine you’re the employee who’s asked to behave this way. You’re given the scripts – customer says “x”, service rep says “y”. If you’re the Borg it’s perfect. If you’re a customer service rep who’s really trying to understand a customer need and meet it? Not so much. It must get pretty hollow pretty fast for the employee. I know it did for the customer.
What do you think? Can you be more human from a customer point of view when you aren’t from an employee point of view? Can organizations institutionalize empathy?
Post script – Had to call the bank again this morning and different person same script… although this lady didn’t ask for permission, just asked if this was Deborah and promptly hung up on me twice! I’m really feeling the love.
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Learning from the Vatican [part 2]
At the time, I found the nun’s description of the disciplined efficiency of the Vatican communication at once awe inspiring and horrifying [see earlier post]. And, even more now as every day brings news of new sexual abuse scandals and questions about who knew what and when?
I have no ‘inside’ knowledge and use the situation of the Church to explore what can and does go wrong in organizations and perhaps gain some understanding of what that might mean to us as communicators.
As an organization, the Church had much that corporate communicators wish for:
- A clarity of vision, mission and values [more on this later]
- A trusted and recognized brand
- Strong and visible and articulate leadership
- Powerful rituals and symbols
- A relationship rather than a transactional focus to clients
- Few layers between the CEO to the front line
- A structured and disciplined approach to communicating
- A continuous flow of rich information out of HQ and back from the ‘front lines’
- A global network of potential communicators [priests] who by calling and training are more empathetic than your average manager
- Opportunity for weekly conversation with clients and potential clients.
So, what happened? And what can we learn from this? [to follow]
Random Posts:
“No charges after Axor exec’s trip”
Imagine you’re an employee at Axor, a large Montreal development company. You wake up one day earlier this month to read that your president and chairman has been arrested and jailed in Florida for drug possession. Turns out he was carrying valium and didn’t have his prescription with him. So the good news is that the arrest was the result of a silly technicality. How many of us carry our prescriptions with us when we travel? You’re sympathetic and probably supportive.
The less good news is that you now know your top executive is taking prescription drugs to reduce anxiety.
What’s he so anxious about that he’s taking valium? If it’s about business should you be anxious too? If it’s something else can he be fully focused on the business and on this drug?
So from a communication point of this little moment is interesting and potentially instructive.
As an institution when, what and how would you communicate on this with employees? clients? Or would you?
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