It is all too easy to let best practices spill out into something like a features list on the side of a Windows 95 box. (If you don’t know what I mean, then please watch this short parody, Microsoft Re-designs iPod Packaging for a hilarious reminder of why customer empathy is important at every step of [...]
There are hundreds of best practices for employee engagement, and all of them are being practiced by firms across this good, green Earth: at some growing businesses, at some failing businesses too. My question is, “How do we know which best practices will most benefit our employee engagement initiatives? Which should I apply in my business?” [...]
Can you think of a business that wants untalented workers? And yet, how many businesses have figured out how to reward ambitious tendencies with real opportunity and career growth? The difference is staggering. According to a recent Gallup poll, 32% of all quitters leave due to poor career advancement and promotion opportunities. Literally one-third of retention [...]
There is an incredible amount of data corroborating the deep relatedness between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. Some of this work focuses specifically on customer-facing employees proving, as reported in Journal of Applied Psychology, that this relationship is indeed reciprocal. Increasing employee satisfaction leads to happier customers, and creating happier customers increases job satisfaction in customer-facing [...]
It is easy to find the definition of Employee Value Proposition (EVP), but it is much more difficult to create one that actually inspires employees. For this reason, strong EVPs are significant differentiators in every market my team has analyzed. Organizations with a strong EVP pay employees less than others and still retain employees 300% longer [...]
Employees want to feel a sense of commitment to their work. And in return for that sense of real, authentic meaning, they will be willing to give more of themselves, aspire to higher productivity, spiraling innovation, and off-the-charts customer satisfaction. Of these three rewards, the highest correlation exists between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. These two [...]
Self-organizing models of governance, like holacracy, are comprehensive approaches to structuring and running businesses. They replace the top-down hegemonic system most enterprises still use, replacing the traditional schema with a new way of distributing real authority that instills adaptiveness and employee engagement in the fabric of an organization. Leaders have always delegated, but what makes holacracy [...]
People live in their own functional domains. They have their responsibilities, their metrics, and they can become defenders of their domains. Though from the best intentions, internal competition ultimately creates the reactionary boundaries that we have come to call silos, which harm an organization in ways that are becoming increasingly fatal. I won’t spend an inordinate [...]
For a Customer Experience (CX) initiative to succeed, it needs broad support across the organization, and it needs deep, gut-level support within the C-Suite. CX is not like a sales methodology, or a new technology. CX is not a tool; it is a creed, a creed that McKinsey asserts “...require organizations to make cultural changes and [...]
Graduation rate is an extremely significant metric for every senior administrator in every higher education institution. US News and World Report uses this important metric in its scoring algorithm, as does every credible media source I can recall. I am personally familiar with this pain and pressure on administrators to boost this number because I lived [...]