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EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES: THE CUSTOMER-EMPLOYEE CONNECTION

Businesses often forget about the culture and ultimately they suffer for it, because they cannot deliver good service from unhappy employees.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos

In the previous chapter we discussed various methods to empower our customers by collecting and (more importantly) acting on information and feedback that our employees collect from our customers on a regular basis. Recognizing that our employees are rich sources of information and customer intelligence that can inevitably help us create and provide an ongoing valuable experience for our customers isn’t novel, but it certainly seems to have slipped through the cracks for many organizations and their leadership, often falling by the wayside amongst efforts to increase efficiency and streamline internal processes. There is only one source that should serve to direct what processes, policies, or technology we introduce into an organization, and that is our customer. With this in mind, we’re faced with a predicament. If our efforts to improve efficiency and streamline processes take a backseat to allowing our employees to have more personal interactions with our customers, how the heck will we ever get any work done?

Let’s take a moment to review a few of the points we’ve discussed so far:

• Today’s customers are more demanding, seeking personalized experiences and the perception of customization that aligns with their evolving needs.
• To reach today’s customers, it’s necessary to be omnipresent because you never know where your customers might be and what they might be reading, both in print and online.
• Responsiveness to customer needs is paramount to building and sustaining customer relationships. Keeping customers waiting for answers is no longer an option, be it in the corporate or retail world.
• Employees today have more education and knowledge than ever before, with an increased desire to collaborate and contribute in their working environment.
• The rapidly increasing size of the Millennial generation and Generation Z, with their various distinctions in needs and expectations over previous generations, will result in a shift in what our customers and employees expect in the coming months and years.
• Leaders at every level of organizations today are faced with growing pressures to deliver results, all while continually improving the morale and productivity of their employees.
• Improving the speed and consistency of employee performance results in efficiencies that, in some instances, detract or take away from creating a personalized customer experience.

All of these points when combined begin to shed light on the fact that the design and management of organizations today must change if we are going to survive—from how we attract talented employees, to how we retain them and ensure they are as productive and creative as possible while supporting our evolving customer needs. As we discussed in Chapter 2, what we once believed to be effective in achieving these objectives is proving to no longer be so. The hierarchal approach to leading and managing an organization, for example, with its origins dating back to the military and made popular during the Industrial Age, is simply no longer effective for attracting or engaging today’s younger workforce.

The question that remains then is, if the structure we’ve built our organizations on is no longer relevant or effective for today’s generations, what is? This isn’t a simple question, and it deserves some careful consideration as we attempt to understand how to connect where we are today (a question which is built on what we’ve known historically to be true) to where we need to be tomorrow (a question that suggests we need to venture into the unknown, making decisions and taking actions in reformulating our organizational structures that are yet proven to be effective). Before addressing this question, however, let’s address a much simpler one. Why should an organization, its leadership team, board, or employees want to introduce or support a change within their organization when nobody knows if it will even work? In other words, if the design and structure of your organization seems to be holding its own, where employees aren’t leaving in droves and customers are generally stable, why fix what isn’t broken? To answer this question, we need to dig deeper into understanding our employees.

Why Your Employees Might Seem Like They Don’t Care

Before we answer the question I just posed, we should back up a bit. Perhaps you’ve attempted to introduce improvements or changes with your organizational structure or communication with the intention of making it more amenable to employees, only to find that your efforts have fallen upon deaf ears or disinterest. In my experience, when attempting to introduce changes to improve employee engagement, morale, productivity, creativity, or involvement, there are typically several common approaches most organizations take:

1. They invest in an engagement survey with employees to identify what the latter seek from their employer, their boss, and their role.
2. They invest in training leaders throughout the organization to improve their coaching and feedback skills with employees.
3. They communicate through quarterly or periodic employee information meetings in which the CEO or senior leaders speak to employees about the state of the business.
4. They introduce a new means of recognizing employee performance tied to providing monetary rewards through different means.

When you first look at this list, you’ll notice some themes amongst these various initiatives. First, they are often introduced to employees, rather than a result of employee feedback or requests. Second, they require a change in employee behaviors or actions initially in order to be successful. Third, and most importantly, they are only successful or effective if employees buy into the fact that there are advantages they might personally experience from following along and supporting such initiatives.

For example, what are the tangible benefits that leaders will receive from taking training? Will it make their days shorter or their interactions with employees easier?

What are the advantages your employees will receive from participating openly and honestly in an engagement survey? Will all of their concerns be addressed? Will they receive the improvements they are seeking in their roles or working environment?

How do the employee information meetings serve to help employees? Will this newfound information make their jobs easier or provide them with more autonomy to make decisions?

If the initiatives you undertake to improve employee morale, engagement, and involvement are perceived as not being helpful to employees, then they will fail, plain and simple. The very introduction of these initiatives often misses the boat in employees’ eyes because they fail to address the most important question in the mind of every employee: “What’s in it for me?”

Let’s drill down a bit further and consider for a moment the infamous “employee engagement survey.” Typically, this is a series of questions asked of employees in an electronic format, providing feedback based on employee selection of predetermined options on topics related to culture, leadership, compensation, and the like. If you or your organization has ever undergone an employee engagement survey, you’ll know that the amount of information received can be daunting, a seeming fire hose of employee complaints that are often unsubstantiated and geared more toward everything an organization is doing wrong rather than right.

Other than the ineffectiveness an electronic version of this type of survey can present (which we discussed in earlier chapters), there is a glaringly obvious problem with employee engagement surveys that appears to be not so obvious. Consider a survey you’ve taken personally in the past; possibly it was an online survey for a retailer such as Home Depot, or a survey sent to you after you purchased a product online. What was it that drove you to invest your own personal time and effort into answering that survey? My guess is you completed the survey when you were either ecstatic with the product or service, or you were absolutely disgusted with the same. Both positions are extreme and motivating enough to encourage you to invest time in completing the survey to communicate your emotions, good or bad. Now apply this same methodology to employee engagement surveys and you may start to recognize exactly why surveys can often be grouped into two categories: those who seem to love working for an organization versus those who seem completely disgusted with not only the organization but everything about it, including the survey itself.

This suggests that quite possibly the results we receive from engagement surveys are not as valuable as they might appear to be on the surface. In addition, a question of accuracy comes into play. If an employee has a bad day or a bad experience on the day they complete the survey, it’s possible that frustrations that may normally not be so prominent will shine through in the survey results. A manager that they normally get along with might suddenly be the worst manager ever on account of a conversation they had earlier in the day. Simply put, holding engagement surveys in this manner, as a sort of test that employees have to complete, is only placing work on the employees that doesn’t help them in the short-term or long-term. Moreover, most employees have had multiple experiences of completing a survey only to find that nothing, on the surface anyway, seems to improve.

Is there a better solution? Yes, and it extends beyond simple surveys. The best solution for obtaining employee input and ideas on how to improve your organization’s working environment for example, including specifics on leadership, compensation, process improvement, and the like is to simply ask your employees for their feedback, one-on-one and face-to-face. No buttons to press and no submissions to be saved. This can be done individually or in focus groups, but the key is that in this format any responses and feedback can be validated, with the trained interviewer having the opportunity to judge and dig deeper based on responses, participants’ body language, and various other nuances. These, in turn, help to determine what questions require further dialogue and elaboration, versus those that are simple and to the point. Say, for instance, you were to ask a question such as this on an electronic survey:

“What characteristics do you like about your direct manager?”

For participants to respond, the only options that are electronically available result from (a) pre-populating several characteristics that might drive employees to respond in a certain fashion, or (b) leave a comments box open. Rarely is option (b) taken without first providing pre-populated options, as it makes it difficult to sort responses and look for trends. The problem with this approach comes when we consider the pre-populated options. First, how do we know if the pre-populated responses may be relevant to the employees’ actual desired response? Second, how do we learn what’s behind the chosen option(s) that explains why an employee would feel this way? Third, what options exist to dig further, as initial responses seem only superficial in nature? The answer to all three of these questions is clear—you can’t. This is why electronic employee engagement surveys (or customer surveys for that matter) are garbage. They serve no more than to put checks in boxes and allow the original respondent to say that they have in fact completed a survey.

When I have shared this idea with proponents or even sellers of employee engagement survey systems and software, I’ve come up against harsh criticism. The main argument they often present is that by completing a survey electronically, organizations and their executives can compare responses to that of their competitors creating a benchmarking opportunity. This may be true, but if you have to pay for the survey (and in any instance I’ve come across, you have to), then why would you pay for this benchmarking information when you can glean it from discussions with others in your sector? Organizations such as the Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium, for example, provide ample opportunities for their members to network and share benchmarking information as part of membership. They encourage their members to share not just benchmarking and experiences relative to employee engagement, but all areas that impact member performance such as productivity, safety, energy management, and so forth.

An electronic employee engagement survey, such as training or mandatory meetings or even new means of providing employee rewards, is often perceived by employees as “just another management initiative.” You know the kind. New ideas, systems, processes, or technology that likely require employees to do something different or in addition to their existing duties with a promise of helping to curb some undesirable features or enhance an existing “organizational performance.”

When it comes to engaging our employees, we have to remember one thing. Employees only care about the organization if they can tie its success directly to their daily activities and role within and, in turn, achieve personal success as a result of supporting their organization’s success.

Too many “changes” that are proposed often inevitably create more work for employees, rather than help them to better support their customers and achieve a feeling of personal satisfaction. Ultimately then, there is an employee disconnect that is further exacerbated as more “initiatives” or “changes” are introduced. It’s for this very reason that many organizations that have invested heavily in completing employee engagement surveys or in training for their leaders still have employees with low levels of engagement. It’s time to stop initiating changes that are for the betterment of the organization, and instead create an environment in which employees identify and initiate the changes themselves. This creates a more positive working environment, increasing productivity and morale consecutively. This is, in my definition, the premise of employee empowerment, and it is the key to creating an organization of employees who care about their customers, their work, and each other.

What is Employee Empowerment?

The best way to engage employees, hands down, is by empowering them. The concept of employee empowerment isn’t new; in fact, I believe much of the term’s philosophy originates from the understanding and benefits that tools such as the lean system have provided, which promote a culture of continuous improvement where employees are focused on improving how they work to best satisfy the needs of the customer.¹ Empowering employees is about realizing that they are the most knowledgeable and best suited to identify and improve how work gets done. It’s about shifting the creativity and decision-making ability to the employees, allowing them the opportunity to enact changes and improvements, introducing systems that make their jobs easier, and helping them be more effective in serving the customer. The following figure outlines the framework for employee empowerment.

There are a plethora of proven examples of employee empowerment, one being Zappos, the online shoe retailer I referenced earlier and whose CEO, Tony Hsieh, embarked on a journey several years ago to remove literally all managers from across the organization, shifting instead to a self-managed, self-organized company structure.² Zappos’ approach may seem a little extreme and is not always necessary, as even shifting some level of autonomy to employees can dramatically influence an organization’s ability to succeed in today’s marketplace. Consider the approach of Mike Vokes, discussed earlier, who shifted the decision-making ability down to his teams, moving away from a centralized leadership model.

Beyond increasing employee engagement, shifting autonomy to employees actually appeals to today’s younger generations who are more comfortable with a collaborative approach to decision-making. This results in higher levels of employee retention and guarantees that decisions are made faster, which enables a more productive working environment. In addition, empowering employees is most effective at ensuring organizations become and remain profitable, given we use the following logical assumptions:

1. The majority of employees accepts and remains in their functional role with the expectation of and desire to work as effectively as possible.
2. Most employees would make decisions that are similar to those of management if provided the same information and context.
3. Employees are best suited and positioned in their roles to make sure customers are satisfied both directly and indirectly.
4. Leaders are unable to be everywhere all of the time; therefore, it makes more sense to shift the decision-making ability to employees to ensure rapid response to customer needs and effective changes in process.
5. Employees are the best positioned to identify what needs to change in order to work efficiently while still servicing the needs of customers.

The logic behind these assumptions is generally received more positively by younger generations than those who are older. This is understandable when we consider that someone who spent his entire working career being told what to do by his boss is more likely to reflect on that situation and believe it is the best approach, versus someone who may have in more recent years experienced a boss who provided freedom in making decisions and taking action, and who would believe this approach to be more effective. I’ve also found that those who are most likely to push back on the concept of employee empowerment are, not surprisingly, leaders themselves.

I completed some work with a small team of 25 employees working within a large association. Our work spanned several months, during which we shifted them from an environment in which the employees were overseen by two separate managers, to a fully empowered team with autonomy to make their own decisions and having no managers. We had commenced the work by redeploying the two managers to different roles outside the team and putting some consistent communication practices in place, including a weekly meeting with the team’s director to discuss changes that were happening both at the organizational level (director’s world) and the operating and customer-facing level (the employee’s world). In addition to these weekly meetings, employees held a daily morning meeting in which they briefly discussed what they were working on for the day and week, and acknowledged any support or impact their work would have on others within the team. Tracking of individual work and projects was completed on a white board and updated by a team champion on a daily basis based on feedback and discussions during the morning meeting. It was these three key changes that were the basis of shifting from an environment in which two managers delegated work and made decisions, to a team environment in which employees made their own decisions.

Why did the director decide to make such an extreme shift, you might wonder? Well, team morale had been extremely low for years, productivity levels were down, and some very talented employees, who got along well with others and were productive in earlier times, had started to leave the team. The director, clearly concerned, had recognized through exit interviews that both of the managers were perceived as micromanaging team members, isolating the employees from each other and creating a somewhat toxic environment in which employees were not serving each other or their customers effectively. By shifting to a more empowered model, not only did productivity improve, but so did team morale and willingness to work with and support one another. For the purposes of helping you to make this transition, I’ve outlined the exact approach that we took in the following.

Six Steps to Empower Employees

The shifts to transitioning to a culture in which employees are empowered can differ depending on the existing culture, leadership style, and structure of the organization; however it follows six steps.

STEP 1: FEEDBACK

Interview employees on the team to understand what is working well and what is not working well, as it pertains to getting work done. Clearly identify any obstacles, bottlenecks, and restrictions that slow the completion of work or create conflict amongst the team.

STEP 2: PLAN

Formulate a plan to redesign the working team(s) aligned on departmental and individual objectives and skills, redeploying leaders in nonmanagement roles.

STEP 3: COMMUNICATION

Identify new methods of communication to ensure individuals within the team communicate on existing work priorities, challenges, and needed support on both a daily (morning brief) and weekly (in-depth review) meeting.

STEP 4: PLANNING

Identify the best methods to communicate work status, incorporating the use of visual tools such as white boards or smart boards, as well as online scheduling tools for more in-depth work tracking. Technology options vary widely, but should provide the information employees need in a timely manner and require little input or effort from employees to manager.

STEP 5: CHAMPIONS

Identify formal and informal team champions to support the initiatives and ensure processes are being followed. These are typically employees who have the respect of other team members and have the ability to support work scheduling and communications.

STEP 6: INTRODUCTION

Introduce the plan to existing employees to outline changes and gain further insights. In addition, introduce plans to customers both internal and external to identify improvements and to demonstrate any changes in service levels and contacts. Warning: it is during this stage that plans will receive pushback and employees may disagree with the approach. Following the stages set forth previously, and including employees throughout, will ensure this is not another management initiative. This said, the degree to which employees push back will determine the extent to which further changes need to be made, and will also support whether a smaller pilot initiative should be introduced to further prove the system and increase employee buy-in and engagement with the process.

For bonus resources and tips on how to empower your employees, make sure you visit www.unstoppableorganization.com.

It’s important to take a moment to revisit a point I referenced earlier. Empowering employees results in higher levels of engagement. Said differently, the degree to which employees are empowered will determine the extent to which you experience improvements in engagement. Shift a few decisions to employees while leaving the existing management structure in place and you’ll see marginal improvements, if any. Take a more extreme approach such as the situation of the association I shared above and you’ll find significantly more improvements in both employee morale and productivity.

With this shift toward empowerment, there is another benefit that is often not considered. As it’s typically management that deals with customers either internal or external, then shifting away from having many (or any) internal managers will create a closer connection between employees and customers. This may make you weary of such a change, but similar to the benefits of employee empowerment, this too will further improve the performance of your organization. I call this the customer-employee connection.

The Customer-Employee Connection

The customer-employee connection is a concept I outlined in my first book, Operational Empowerment, defining it as a critical component to ensuring customers have the perception of value in every transaction they have with your organization. Specifically, as your employees are connecting with your customers every day on various levels, it goes without saying that helping employees understand what your customers value, and how they can provide it, is critical for an unstoppable organization. Creating this customer-employee connection is a natural evolution of empowering your employees as, for employees to make educated decisions and in turn take actions to support your customers, they must be empowered. More succinctly, empowering employees will yield a stronger customer-employee connection.

In order to facilitate a strong and constructive connection between customers and employees, there are several considerations to take when transitioning to an empowered team or culture, namely:

1. Value of time: Customers today want their products or services delivered to them in record time, set to their specific agenda. What this means is that, in servicing customers, there is a conflict between an organization’s desire to process customer needs quickly, versus the customer’s needs to ensure the time spent with them satisfies their needs.
2. Product or service knowledge: Employees must be fully versed in and able to quickly access information about the product or service they are providing if they are to satisfy the customer. Returning back to point 1, if customers value time, then having employees place them on hold or not return calls only serves to annoy them.
3. Customer needs: As we discussed in earlier chapters, not only is it important for an organization to understand the evolving needs of its customers, it’s also important for employees to understand the specific needs of their direct customer. Externally, this might seem simple and information can be collected and distributed based on customer interviews, but we also need to consider internal customers. Does finance understand why holding off on the next equipment purchase will be detrimental to productivity and increase the risk of missing production targets?

By empowering employees with a better understanding of both internal and external customer needs, organizations can create a stronger customer-employee connection whereby customer needs always come first.

As an example of the power of this connection, I will share my experience with an organization I worked with nearly two years ago which transitioned to an employee-empowerment model. Initially, I interviewed several employees in the organization’s accounting department and when I asked them what end they believed their end customers desired, they looked at one another and guessed, “Lower prices?” Digging further, I asked where this perception had come from. Most replied that they were only presuming this was the need, as they couldn’t figure out why customers would pay so much for their products considering how inefficient the organization was. Yikes! Educating employees on customer needs is critical to creating the right mindset and providing sufficient information in an environment in which employees can make their own decisions.