Tag Archives: engagement

Leadership Card 32 – Checking In To Increase Engagement (and Customers)

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Leadership Card 32 – Checking In to Increase Engagement (and Customers)

Leadership Card 032 Checking In

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The Best, Most Loved Leaders Check in Regularly With Their Team

The Gallup business journal recently found that there is a very clear way to increase your team’s engagement in their work.  They found that leaders who check in at least once a week with each individual in their team, while focusing on their strengths, saw up to a 27% increase in engagement.

To put that into perspective, companies in the top quartile of engagement have enjoyed twice the revenue of companies in the bottom quartile of engagement, according to a study by Kenexa.  Other studies by Gallup have shown lower absenteeism (by 41%), improved sales rates, and significantly improved productivity in companies with highly engaged staff.  Improving your engagement by 27% could easily move you into that top quartile where all the magic happens.

Do you want to be a leader that everybody loves?  Check in with people regularly, and focus on their strengths.  Part of this comes down to another key to increasing engagement – in fact some people have called it the main key.  And that is progress.

Employee Engagement cartoon Making Progress

By checking in regularly with your team, and focusing on their strengths, you are facilitating both a sense of progress, and the likelihood of real progress itself.  Teresa Amabile found in her research and writings called “The Progress Principle” that people’s happiness increased when they had a sense of progress.  In fact, there’s a good chance you can relate to this.  How many times have you thought about (or actually gone ahead with) quitting your job or business plan because you weren’t making any progress?

So check in with your team, focus on their strengths, and make sure they are on the right track making progress.

Check In With Your Customers To Significantly Increase Sales

Retaining customers can be one of the hardest things in business, but when you get it right, studies have found very real increases in revenue and profit.  One study by the author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Frederick Reichheld) found that retaining an extra 5% of your customers led to an increase in profit of between 25% and 95%.  And if you think about it, it makes sense.  Most of the cost to acquire a customer is spent up front, with advertising, brand awareness, many meetings or phone calls and even steep sales discounts.  But once a customer has formed a habit of doing business with your company, there is a much lower chance they will go searching for something else.

And this is where feedback comes in.

It’s such a simple concept, yet almost no company does it well (outside of many of the best, most profitable companies).  You want to search out customer feedback.  Are you getting complaints?  Great!  At least your customers are telling you.  Don’t hide away from the complaints – they are free feedback that is worth its weight in gold if you know how to fix their problem and improve.

Customer feedback might take the form of a survey, a Facebook or Google review, a complaint (as we noted) or even praise (statistically less likely, but still nice).  And when we get any type of feedback, we want to solve the operational problems that lead to anything negative.

Lean Cartoon Fix Operational Problems

Work taking too long?  Solve the operational problem behind it.  Staff on-site leaving a mess after their work?  Solve the operational problem behind it.  Quality of the product not lasting long enough?  Solve the operational problem behind it.

And – here’s where things come full circle – the best way to solve operational problems is to ensure you have a standard, repeatable process in place and then check in regularly to ensure it is being done.  And if it’s being done, but the results are still bad, then you improve the repeatable process and roll it out again.

Rinse and repeat on your way to exponential growth – just buy me a beer when you pass your first million.

There’s the other side to this tale as well – as your business grows and you rely on repeatable processes more, if you don’t check in to see if those processes are giving you the outcome you want, there is a good chance you’ll run into trouble.  If you don’t check, you can’t adjust, and if you don’t adjust, you may not get the results you want.  Pilots check their course regularly on their way to their destination, and so should you, by checking in with your team, your customers, and making sure they are getting the outcomes they want.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Lean CX ScoreGet "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Lean CX Vlog 001 – Logging the Journey

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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

Leadership Card 22 – Growth and Contribution

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Design For Ease Of Use, Leadership Card 22 – Growth and Contribution

Leadership Card 022 Growth and Contribution Lean CX Ease of Use

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Engineering Happiness by Using Growth and Contribution

Researchers and business owners alike have found something incredible over the years, and that is that money is not always the answer when it comes to getting the best results from your team.

Sure, you could throw money at something to try and improve it – maybe approve a project, get the latest third party provider to work with you, give bonuses for performance or commissions for certain activities.  But making happiness and engagement come from within has been shown to get far greater results.

People Want To Grow

There’s a great 30 second video by vlogger Casey Neistat that shows him on a treadmill, and says that life is like being on that treadmill.  To stay in one place, you have to keep moving.  If you stop moving, you actually fall behind, you don’t just stay in the same place.  And to get ahead, you have to hustle – you have to run and you have to grow.

When you help the people in your team grow, by focusing on their strengths and enabling them to improve, stretch, and get better, then their happiness actually improves.  And improving their happiness has an affect on your company’s bottom line, with up to 20% more productivity, and improved profit as a result.

People Want To Contribute

Growth isn’t the only thing that motivates your people from the inside out.  Focusing on something bigger than they are – a larger goal that helps others – also gives people the motivation to do better and become more than they are.

It’s not always easy to focus on growing yourself, while also focusing on contributing to others, but if you can find a way to engineer both of these into your work, you will see some stunning results.

How To Do It, Practically?

So how can we do it practically, as a leader?  Checking in with each person in your team at least once a week, and focusing on their strengths, has been proven to improve engagement by up to 27%.  That means getting to know them, making the time to meet with them, and finding a way to use the strengths and passions they have to enable them to grow.

Doing that, you can also set stretch targets or look at ways to grow within those strength areas.

Contributing to others can be aligning your work and processes to how they meet the company’s targets, or how they meet the needs of your customers and the outcomes of helping them.

Most people aren’t aware of these things they can do as a leader to improve their team’s results.   But doing these small things can make the difference between success and failure, and being a mediocre leader or a great one.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Lean CX Infographic – More Incredible Benefits Of Employee Engagement

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Lean CX Infographic Employee Engagement Benefits

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Employee Engagement It’s Official: It Matters

Which would you rather, having a team full of people dragging their feet, complaining, making excessive mistakes and who hate coming to work?

Or a team full of highly engaged, happy, motivated people who can’t do enough for you?

Yep, I thought so.  Employee engagement matters, and having a team who is in the top quartile for employee engagement makes a huge difference, not just to your happiness but to your bottom line as well.

These top companies and teams see 28% less theft.  41% less absenteeism, meaning more and more staff turn up to do their work because they enjoy it.  And a whopping 59% lower staff turnover.

And do you think these things affect your profit and cost as a company?  You bet.  How much does it cost to advertise, interview, hire, train, and level up a new person to replace someone previously?  And how much do staff accidents and even a little bit of theft here or there really cost?  It’s more than you think.  And it can be avoided by focusing on engaging your employees.

What Engagement Doesn’t Mean

Now I’m not talking about the latest rah-rah retreat, where everybody gathers around, drinks smoothies (or cocktails) and whiteboards a bunch of baloney that will never get done.

No. Freaking. Way.

I’m talking about culture.  But not “Culture” as a broad, flimsy, consultant-type term.  Oh no.  I’m talking about culture where I can give you specific steps that anyone (and everyone) can perform every week to create a culture of high engagement and problem solving.

It’s called Designing your work for Ease of Use.

Designing Your Work for Ease of Use

Designing your work for Ease of Use is one of the easiest, fastest, and cost effective ways to improve the engagement of your team and the profit of your company.

The Ease of Use framework may seem simple, but its methods are based on research such as that above, where we are looking to improve the engagement of your teams and make the people you work with happier (and more productive) as a result.

Having a standard, repeatable process with clear outcomes may seem boring or simple, but did you know that 50% of American workers don’t know what is expected of them at work?

Making things visual so you know what to do first time without having to ask may seem mundane, but did you know that every time you have to redo something you’re not sure of, you are effectively doubling, tripling, quadrupling your cost for the same outcome?

Checking in regularly may seem unnecessary to some, but did you know that leaders who check in at least once a week with their team mates and focus on their strengths see a 27% increase in engagement?

Designing your work for ease of use matters.  It makes a difference.  And as it improves the ease of the work your team performs, it reduces their frustrations and improves their happiness too.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Lean CX ScoreGet "The Lean CX Score" now, and start creating disruptors in your industry that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Lean CX Score – Good Customer Experience Engages Your Team By More Than 25%

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Lean CX ScoreThis is an excerpt from "The Lean CX Score."  Get your copy now and start creating disruptors that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Good Customer Experience Engages Your Team by More Than 25%

Good customer experience also engages your team, and increases retention and productivity of your team members by a significant amount.

Now you might be thinking, “Surely that can’t be true.”  After all, it’s easy to see how CX can affect the end customer, but improving our team engagement and retention too?  It certainly can.  If anyone you provide a service to is your “customer”, then that means the people you work with all have experiences that can be improved too.

Here’s a quick example.  One of the key steps in the Lean CX Score, as you will soon see, is “Check and Stop”.  Check and Stop means we get feedback quickly and we use it just as fast.  One report by the Gallup Business Journal found that a key factor of highly engaged team-mates was receiving feedback at least once a week *12.

It helped them to know if what they were doing was working; they could adjust where necessary, and it made them want to stay and do a good job.

Compare this with team members where there was no regular check-in.  The research showed they were 97% more likely to be disengaged in their work *13.

Increasing your team’s engagement doesn’t just benefit you if you’re a leader.  Having engaged team-mates has been a huge focus of powerhouses like Google over the past few years because engaged team-mates are happier, have more workplace friends, generally enjoy their lives more and also perform way better than teams that aren’t engaged.

You may have heard the study from Gallup International that found 70% of employees are disengaged at work *14.  But what you may not have heard is that disengaged team members are at least six times more likely to leave their job than team members who are engaged in their work *15.  If you think it’s expensive to acquire customers, it’s extremely expensive to find and hire good staff.  It’s much easier to keep them engaged in the first place.

Engaged team members will also make you more money.  A separate study by the firm Kenexa found that businesses with highly engaged employees achieved twice the annual net revenue on average than businesses with lower engagement scores *16.  That’s a 100% difference in percentage terms of revenue.

All of this comes from just one step in the Lean CX Score.  Can you imagine what will happen when you put them all together?

More chapters from The Lean CX Score book:

Lean CX ScoreThis is an excerpt from "The Lean CX Score."  Get your copy now and start creating disruptors that completely annihilate your competition.

Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.