Executive’s Guide to the few Employee measures that matter

Want to be a true Leader? Let employees be your guide…

by

The key to successful workplace initiatives that create long-term change and impact is providing workers with the knowledge they need to do their best work. This is only possible when you “guide” employees rather than “grade” them.

While leaders—understandably—want high productivity from their teams, constantly checking in and monitoring their performance is not the way to get there. Rather, such a workplace is perceived as one where employees are graded – constantly watched and then judged. That environment offers no chance for building a high-trust culture, where innovation flourishes and everyone feels like they own the process and have a stake in the business.

Instead, the better way is to guide. Gallup research shows that only two in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Read more

Measures are more like taxes than you realize

by

As a leader, you can gain a new perspective on measures if you realize that measures are like taxes.

And like enlightened governments, we should be able to justify  the “individual cost” the way governments justify taxes: Take responsibility for your share, and you’ll reap the benefits every day.

First, like taxes, measures can be a burden.

Read more

Guidepost statements – critical for creating modern measures that matter

by

The best-run organizations not only have a strategy everyone understands, but they connect employee behaviors to achieving that strategy. This becomes very powerful when each and every employee is engaged by a compelling purpose and knows what to do in order to achieve that purpose.

While vision and mission statements are great for calm, contemplative moments, these are few and far between for most people in the thick of a busy workday, particularly in the interrupt-driven world of Support and Shared Services. Today, with volumes of information available to both customers and employees, deciding what to do in the absence of clear direction can become paralyzing. If your team is in the middle of raging seas in a life raft in pitch darkness, with winds howling all around and no way of knowing which way to go, how do they decide what to do next? The guidepost statement will guide their actions.

Read more

Rethinking the Legacy of a Leader

by

The definition of “a leader,” specifically in the corporate world and western hemisphere, has morphed and evolved quite a bit in the last century or so. Early in the 19th century, a business “leader” was a titan of industry, usually a once-poverty-stricken lad (and yes, way back when, it was a young man) who pulled …

Read more

Free resources from Roundtables with Phil — Developing Leadership Skills

by

Service leaders often are the pillar that others lean on when things descend into chaos.

But what happens when everything collapses around us, and we too feel the crushing weight of a pandemic that upends all our plans and stresses our systems, our people, and ourselves to the limit?

We can muddle through, or we can build on the foundation that marks our profession—the willingness to help each other—to know that all of us are better than any one of us.

Introducing Roundtables with Phil

That’s why we invited 28 service leaders — colleagues, customers, industry leaders, and thought gurus to orchestrate a series of roundtable conversations to explore ways to help each other and share tips, “gotchas,” and new best practices as we navigate our way to surer footing.

Read more

Measures, Metrics & Madness

by

Background
For a few years now, leaders at customer support organizations have talked about moving customers from a ‘transaction-based’ service and support model to a ‘relationship-based’ one. This involves changing customers’ perceptions, from contacting you only when there are break-fix or how do I questions, to one that understands their business, including the technical and business context of their queries.

With this new approach, you don’t just wait for customers to contact you and then react. Your teams embed knowledge sharing into their practices to reduce or eliminate the ‘known’ issues that customers call about, leaving time for ‘new’ issues or queries that need a personal touch to resolve. You help your customers’ business become more successful by improving the way they use your products and services. This evolution in turn is an important first step in moving from
an expert for hire to a trusted advisor.

After early successes in this journey, many organizations run into a seemingly impenetrable wall. Your senior team ‘gets it,’ but this understanding does not seem to trickle down to most mid-level managers and frontline teams. You are able to get people to share knowledge to tackle the proverbial low hanging fruit (answers to simple issues or frequently repeated questions), but you can’t seem to convince other groups to share knowledge around complex and rarely-repeated processes.

Do they just not get it? What exactly is going on?

Read more

Executive’s Guide to the few employee metrics that matter

by

This is part three of a six-part series on each of the Categories of Focus suggested by the new standard Open Customer Metrics Framework (OCMF). Learn more about this modern, open framework and its five categories of focus in my first post on this topic.

The OCMF suggests that executives should spend about 20% of your time on work regarding your employees – the “Employee Category,” which we’ll walk through here.

Let’s admit it. While we talk a lot about how important employees are to us, it’s appalling how little time we actually have to spend on them. After all, employee engagement is a leading indicator of financial performance[1] including customer ratings, productivity and profitability. We spend a lot more time worrying about what our customers say and think, and making sure our financials are in order (Business Category, in OCMF parlance) than we do about employees.

Read more