People are amazing - just let them
People are amazing - just let them
I was talking to my brother Tim, who works in the Customer Service industry. As so often happens, our conversation turned to Leadership and Customer Experience. Tim shared his thoughts about the correlation between an empowered work environment (Great Place to Work) and continuously improving the customer experience.
He shared that continuous improvement requires a culture of innovation, risk taking, experimenting, free thinking and most of all, ownership. All of those are part of building a great place to work.
Tim goes on to say that the foundation for a Great Place to Work is having respect for each person on the site and their contributions. Fundamentally the relationship of managers to their teams has to be: “What can I do to help you achieve your goals?”. This is the basic relationship between all support staff and front line employees, and it is powerful. Tim considers it the secret sauce. The best leaders don’t talk much about it – they just model the behaviour for their organizations. It is a cornerstone of sites that have high employee engagement.
A work environment founded on respect and customer obsession will have a strong culture of ownership. Ownership happens when all employees will participate with ideas and implementing those ideas to improve the customer experience and their own workplace. Ownership means having a stake in the outcome, and having the ability influence that outcome. On a site level this is accomplished in part by having strong, empowered forums in place: employee forums, fun forums, safety forums. Teams of employees that come up with ideas, make decisions and implement. Employees have live, fluid forums that are full ideas being exchanged and bounced around. Ownership and engagement don’t happen just in Kaizens or in meetings – rather they have to be part of the very fabric of an empowered site and are present in every interaction – be it internal or with an external customer.
And the great thing, says Tim, is when the employees are coming up with ideas, making decisions and implementing, it frees up the leadership team to focus on hiring great people, developing the team, removing roadblocks (empowering) , and further encouraging the culture. The fewer tactical decisions the leadership team has to make, the more they can focus on building a great place to work and driving continuous improvement for the customers.
Tim summarizes as follows: Hire the right people, build a culture of customer obsession, employee engagement, empowerment and innovation. Get out of the way. Watch amazing things happen. Recognize, replicate, repeat.
Pretty much sums it up. Great Leadership advice!
I was talking to my brother Tim, who works in the Customer Service industry. As so often happens, our conversation turned to Leadership and Customer Experience. Tim shared his thoughts about the correlation between an empowered work environment (Great Place to Work) and continuously improving the customer experience.
He shared that continuous improvement requires a culture of innovation, risk taking, experimenting, free thinking and most of all, ownership. All of those are part of building a great place to work.
Tim goes on to say that the foundation for a Great Place to Work is having respect for each person on the site and their contributions. Fundamentally the relationship of managers to their teams has to be: “What can I do to help you achieve your goals?”. This is the basic relationship between all support staff and front line employees, and it is powerful. Tim considers it the secret sauce. The best leaders don’t talk much about it – they just model the behaviour for their organizations. It is a cornerstone of sites that have high employee engagement.
A work environment founded on respect and customer obsession will have a strong culture of ownership. Ownership happens when all employees will participate with ideas and implementing those ideas to improve the customer experience and their own workplace. Ownership means having a stake in the outcome, and having the ability influence that outcome. On a site level this is accomplished in part by having strong, empowered forums in place: employee forums, fun forums, safety forums. Teams of employees that come up with ideas, make decisions and implement. Employees have live, fluid forums that are full ideas being exchanged and bounced around. Ownership and engagement don’t happen just in Kaizens or in meetings – rather they have to be part of the very fabric of an empowered site and are present in every interaction – be it internal or with an external customer.
And the great thing, says Tim, is when the employees are coming up with ideas, making decisions and implementing, it frees up the leadership team to focus on hiring great people, developing the team, removing roadblocks (empowering) , and further encouraging the culture. The fewer tactical decisions the leadership team has to make, the more they can focus on building a great place to work and driving continuous improvement for the customers.
Tim summarizes as follows: Hire the right people, build a culture of customer obsession, employee engagement, empowerment and innovation. Get out of the way. Watch amazing things happen. Recognize, replicate, repeat.
Pretty much sums it up. Great Leadership advice!
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