Category Archives: Vlog

Lean CX Vlog 002 – DESIGN YOUR WORK

Are you unhappy in your job?  Do you hate your work?  Is your life boring?  I’ve got something that you may find controversial, and if this is you I want to say that it’s NOT your fault.  Your leader has not intentionally designed your work for ease of use and engagement – probably because they don’t know how.

So the question is – if they’re not going to lead, then who is?  And the answer is YOU.  YOU are the leader your team needs to get intentional about designing your work for ease of use and engagement, and when you do, no matter what industry or work type you are in, you will start enjoying those 8 to 12 hours everyday we call “Work”.

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Transcript:

David McLachlan:  It’s an absolutely beautiful morning in the city, this is gonna be a great ride.  But I really want to talk to you about something super important, in fact one thing that we haven’t really spoken about over the last couple of videos is a little thing called designing your work.

Like I said I really want to talk to you about designing your work, and more specifically designing your work for ease of use.  So what does it mean to design your work?  Well think about it from this perspective.  Have you
ever had to call a company, or deal with another department in your company, and you can just tell they don’t really know what they’re doing?  You know, they have to redo things over and over again, they have to hand off to another department or another person, there’s a lot of waiting in between steps and the person that you’re dealing with or even a team or another department, and the person that you’re dealing with is just dragging their feet and everything is too hard for them.  And all of this grates on the experience.

So pretty soon you’re not wanting to do business with these people or this
company because of all of this extra friction, and it’s quite obvious that they don’t like their job.  I’m gonna say something a little bit controversial and that is it’s not their fault.  It’s actually because their process and their work has not been intentionally designed for ease of use.  Because when you design your process in your work and your job for ease of use you’re making things easy naturally so then it wouldn’t matter these things would be easy for that person to do, whether they were having a good day or a bad day.  And we all have bad days but there’s absolutely no excuse for having a bad process.

So why is it important to design your work, and specifically design for ease of use?  Well, a recent study found that more than 50% of people in their jobs
actually don’t know what’s expected of them at work.  And because of that they’re not doing the best job that they can do.  And of course out of those people who don’t really know what’s expected of them at work there’s a higher proportion of people who are disengaged in their work – just like that person we were talking about before who’s dragging their feet and everything’s too
hard.  These are everyday people trying to do a good job but they may not
necessarily be able to, because it hasn’t been made clear what is expected.  The outcomes and the steps have not been made clear.

Disengaged workers  – the impact that has on your business is, their sales rates are lower their productivity is lower.  Happiness has a big impact on your bottom line.  Now look at it from the other perspective as well.  Recent research by Stanford University actually found 35 percent was the difference in results of people who had clear outcomes and people who had not clear outcomes at all.  Teams and companies that didn’t have clear outcomes actually performed 35% worse than people and teams and companies that
did have clearly articulated outcomes and clearly designed steps to get there.

Now there’s another study as well that was done on happiness and flow, and it’s by a great man called Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, and in the 1960s he took a thousand people and interviewed them when they found the most happiness
and meaning in their lives and there were a handful of things, but three of
the most prominent were they had control over the outcome when they were doing the task, they had a clear objective when they were doing the task, just like the Stanford University study and just like the Gallup study as well, and the task gave immediate feedback.  Now all of these things are actually part of the
ease-of-use framework which I’m going to share with you over the next couple of videos.  So everything is starting to tie together all of the research is pointing in a very very very similar direction, and that direction is making sure that we’re clearly articulating things, intentionally designing the work, and
designing it specifically for ease of use.

Now I’m going to go into the five steps of the ease-of-use framework in other
videos but really quickly they are: making your process repeatable so it’s
the same great repeatable process every time, reducing those steps to a customer getting what they want, making it visuals so they can see exactly what to do first time without having to ask, making it impossible to make a mistake and checking in so that we know whether they got what they want or not.

So where do we go from here?  A very simple thing that you can do straight up is just simply write out the steps that you take to perform a few of the tasks in your work and then try and reduce those steps so by reducing the steps you are actually reducing the complexity making things easier just straight off the bat just doing those two things alone will have a massive impact on your business and the rest of it comes down to the ease-of-use framework which I absolutely cannot wait to share with you over the next coming videos.

I hope to see you then, chat soon.

David McLachlan

Lean CX Vlog 001 – Logging the Journey

It’s About Disruptors and Engagement

Welcome to the first vlog on Lean CX.  This will follow my journey as a Customer Experience practitioner and author.  I’m making these videos to hone the Lean CX message, and log the process of improving companies, people and myself as I go along.

And where do I get to by the end of this video?  That it’s all about Disruptors and Engagement.  Hope you enjoy!

There is more – much more – coming soon.

Chat to you then – Dave

Transcript:

Dave:   It’s still a bit dark in the morning as you can see, but that sunrise even though it’s not as good now was beautiful this morning!  The reason I took you out this morning is that I want to talk to you about something really really important.

(About the Quad Bike Rider) What an awesome job.  Now that guy wouldn’t
have any problem with engagement – he gets to hoon around on a quad bike all day!  That’s pretty cool.

So I want to show you this – I just got – I just got this back from the printers and what it is is a card deck.  It’s the customer experience card deck.  There’s a leadership card deck as well and it goes through all of those ease-of-use principles to make your job easy to do and to make your product easy to take up as well.  But it all comes down to this – I don’t know if you can see it – but a simple action.  And the thing about simple actions is most people when they’re, you know designing their work or trying to get you to do some work or trying to get you to buy a product it’s harder to make something simple to do.  It’s actually harder for us – it takes more effort and more work for us to design it in a way that is very very simple.  And that’s the point – the framework that I’ve designed makes it easier for you to make it easier for
your workmates and for your customers and doing so has a massive impact on your profit.

So I’m sure these first videos are going to be pretty bad, as I just get up to speed and try and hone the message.  Because the message is really clear to
me – we need to make things easy and the easier we make things then the more people are going to do them.  Whether it’s our workmates or whether it’s the customers we want to buy a product or our application or our service.  So ease of use is absolutely everything and these videos are going to help me hone that message and also show you a little bit of Brisbane City which is an
absolutely beautiful city especially in the morning.

If you can imagine when things are easy to do they’re much easier to buy and
much easier for your workmates to perform so you know the profit, the cost
reduction, all those things flow from ease of use in a massive, massive way and
I just want to log the process of me going along this journey and I hope you
enjoy the series because it’s really going to show you how to create
disruptors and also create engagement in your team.

Thank you for watching!

Chat soon – David McLachlan