Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

employee

The story your employees tell their friends and family at the end of the day

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We can look at the employee experience from 10.000 ft. as we have done in previous posts (great cultures, conversations and employee life cycle).

Or we can go down real close up and look at the day-to-day experience.

Using the same tools and principles from Service Design thinking that we use in mapping the customer journey, we can map the employee journey over the day. When we look at it that way, a workday has three sections: Before work, work and after work. In each of the sections, we have a number of touch points related to whatever the situation is.

At each of the touch point, there will be 3 things going on: doing, thinking and feeling. The three elements are interdependent. Change one and it influences the other two.

Let’s begin with the end.

What happens at the end of the day? We go home for dinner or maybe off to the pub for a drink and invariably we get the question: So how was your day? And then we tell our story. Sometimes we may even feel a strong need to tell the story without anyone asking to hear it.

Our stories are interpretations.

According to Daniel Kahneman, the remembering self uses stories to make sense of the world. As soon as we experience something, we fit it into the story in our heads. What we retain from our experiences is a story.

Therefore, when we recount a memory, we’re sharing the experience of the story we created, not the actual experience.

And what defines stories?

Most of the individual moments of an experience are lost and don’t make it into the story we remember, except for changes, significant moments, and endings.

Those three key elements are what you need to be thinking about when you think through the employee journey. All three have a direct impact on their feelings.

Feelings often change as a result of shifts in our circumstances. When things go as we expect, our feelings are stable. When things go better, we are more positive and when they go worse than expected, we tend to become more negative. (Unless we are very aware of how this works and know how to deal with our own mindset, but that is a different story). The same goes for significant moments. If they are positive, they influence us in a positive way; if negative we also become negative. That endings are so important may come as a surprise to most people but it shouldn’t.

But if you think about it, when was the last time you saw a movie or read a book that had a depressing ending? There are not a lot of them around. The reason is that if you watch a movie that ends badly, you are not very likely to recommend it to your friends and family. It can be gruesome and depressing most of the time but it needs to end well otherwise you will be disappointed.

Feelings drive engagement.

So in the same way that we try and maintain stable blood sugar levels throughout the day by paying attention to what we eat, we should as managers be aware that maintaining stable emotional levels on our team has a lot to do with how we manage changes, significant moments and endings.

Changes in the day are inevitable, but could we reduce the impact of some of them. Be more clear in our communication or issue; heads-up warnings about things we think might happen. If we do, we make it easier for them to cope.

Significant events, some could just happen we know that but could we consciously create more positive significant events?  Take five minutes to gather around the coffee machine and celebrate something. Ring a ships bell when we sign up a new client and pass around the cookie jar. There are lots of opportunities in a day to make certain moments more significant than others.

The way the day ends not only shapes how an employee perceives the whole day.  How the day ends also contributes significantly to their expectations for the following day. The key question we should be asking ourselves is: do we send our people home and the end of the day in a mood where they look forward to coming back tomorrow?

A hotel head of housekeeping I have been coaching came up with a lovely way to do this. Every afternoon at 3 pm, she gathers the housekeeping team in the restaurant, serves them ‘guest-coffee’ (this was important she told me) and a pastry. They would spend the last 20 min of their shift having an informal chat about the day and how everyone feels. She tells me it has contributed to improving the relationships between them and their sense of being in this together.

What can you do to create great endings for your team members?

I would love to hear any ideas or real life examples of this if you feel like sharing, email me here.

There is more to a great employee experience than you think.

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When we design our customer experience, we typically focus on the touch points, moments of truth or my favourite moments of need. Whatever we choose to call them, these are the moments when the customer enters into contact with our service delivery system.

Typically (but not exclusively) the contact takes one of two forms: a human touch point or a mechanical/technical touch point, like a website, a check-in console or even an airplane seat. These are important moments that combined make up the full customer experience.

As I argued in my previous blog post, the human touch points have the highest potential to create the emotional connection that is crucial in our efforts to build loyalty, but they also carry the highest risk. If our human element does not deliver, it can be much worse than an automated experience. The mechanical touch point can generally be engineered to be emotionally neutral but rarely produces something that makes your heart sing. I recently checked in to one of these fully automated hotels. It was late, I was driving and just needed a bed for a few hours. All the automation worked, but I felt terribly lonely, with no human interaction whatsoever. There was nothing wrong with the product. But there was also nothing in that experience that would entice me to do it again or tell my friends (positively) about it.

The front line employee makes or breaks it

Our front line employee has the power to make or break the experience for our customer and if we want to make sure that our customer has the best possible experience, we need to make sure that our employee experience is the best possible. Sounds so evident, but that is not always what I observe out there.

So how do we design a great employee experience?

The starting point is behaviour.

When you think about your customer experience, your dream scenario is that your employee does ‘something’ that will make the customer feel appreciated, valued, looked after etc. This is why a lot of companies invest time and effort into training their staff to do certain things in a certain way and that is great. But it only takes us halfway to where we need to be. Because when our staff does things right, we only score 3-3,5 on a satisfaction scale of 1-5. The reason is that from a customer point of view, good is the expected level. You are not surprising them by being good, that is what they expect, and anyway most of your competitors are also ‘good’ otherwise they would not have even been in the game.

So in order to take the experience beyond the 3.5, we need to make an emotional connection. In practical terms, that means that the frontline staff need to invest a bit of themselves in the transaction. They will need to be flexible and adapt to each interaction and add to that interaction what they think would be meaningful to exactly this customer situation, be empathetic. It is not enough to say: ‘have a nice day’. That is not much better than the voice at the end of the escalator at the airport that says: Watch your step… watch your step… watch…

What drive positive service behaviours beyond just mechanically doing things right?

Motivation drives behaviour.

Motivation, engagement, mindset, call it what you like. But whatever you call it, let’s agree that it is some form of inner drive. The best service employee wants to do this. They enjoy being engaged and that is driven by how they feel. What influences how they feel?

The two primary drivers of how we feel on the job are: The culture that we are part of and the systems we are working with.

When we put all this together, we have the consultant’s favourite 2×2 matrix, but this one is a bit different because it is actually a very simple version of Ken Wilbers four quadrants in Integral Theory.

These four quadrants are interdependent. Change something in one and you affect the other three. If they become unbalanced in the sense that what is going on in one quadrant is not congruent with what we would like to see in another quadrant, then the ‘whole ‘ is not functioning optimally.

A simple example

A CEO called me to work with his group of middle managers. “They are not a team, they do not collaborate with each other and it is driving me nuts,” he said. “Can you please work with them and make that happen?”. So I asked him “What kind of remuneration system do they have?” Oh, he said, ” They get a handsome salary and they can earn a substantial individual bonus depending on how their department performs.”

Game over. As long as he maintains this ‘system’ of remuneration’, the ‘motivation’ for each of them is to do their best in they own department. There is no reason for them to collaborate. If he then further reinforces this by very strictly follow up on individual department performance, it just makes things even worse.

Understand the employee perspective through the 4 lenses

If you start analysing your service business using these four lenses, you very quickly start uncovering all sorts of things that are not congruent and therefore counter productive. The obvious ones are often in the ’System’ category. ‘Process’ or ways of working that are frustrating for front line employee but that nobody has done anything about. These we can often flesh out using Service Design tools like employee journey maps.

But the less obvious sources of disengagement come from the culture box and is typically related to what kind of psychological environment the supervisor and the supervisor’s boss is creating. As I have written about before here, culture beats strategy, always. We will take a closer look at that next week.

This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

What kind of manager are you? A,B or C?

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We all learn from the feedback that we receive. That is probably no surprise. Your golf stroke is hard to improve if you are blind-folded, you need to see where the ball lands in order to correct your aim. That is one aspect of feedback.

To get really good, we need more than our own observations in order to improve. We need feedback from others who are also observing what is going on. Maybe even someone who encourages us to believe that we can do better than we thought possible ourselves.

So imagine the following scenario.

We take three people. Stand them in a line next to each other and in front of each of them place a bucket at about 5 meters distance. Once they have seen the bucket, we blindfold them and hand them another bucket with 10 tennis ball in it. Their job is to throw the tennis balls and get as many of them as possible into the bucket.

Each person is assigned a manager. And each manager has been instructed to behave (manage) slightly different.

On team A, the manager makes no comments as each ball is thrown but will just count how many balls are in when the session is over and will give the team member a performance review based on that. In this case, the only feedback the team member gets is the sound of the tennis ball hitting or not hitting the bucket.

On Team B, the manager has been instructed to comment on each throw and if it is not in the bucket then point out what the problem is. “Too far, too short, again! way to the side etc.” If the ball is in, the comment is just: “It’s in.”

On Team C, the manager has been instructed to give more detailed feedback on each ball combined with encouragement. “That was just 10 cm too far left but otherwise great shot, try again. Take a breath and focus etc.”

You can try this experiment for yourself. I often do it with larger groups of managers. But you probably do not need to perform the experiment to guess who of the three consistently gets most tennis balls in the bucket at the end of the day.

It’s pretty elementary my dear Watson, as Sherlock would say, but despite that, if you ask employees or middle managers, they are going to tell you that type A or B managers are much more common in their life than type C managers are. From a performance point of view, that is problematic. If we don’t have a positive constructive feedback culture, we will be underperforming, it’s that simple.

So the big question you need to ask yourself is what kind of manager are you?

Take it a step further. Imagine we added a four team, Team D. And here the instruction to the manager is. No matter what happens, just praise and be positive. But no detailed feedback. So this would sound like “Yes! Well done. Wonderfull. Wow!” and so on…

Now I am not suggesting that many managers are giving this kind of useless feedback to their people. No, the problem here is that this is the kind of feedback many managers RECIEVE from their team members. If team members do not feel 100% confident that it is safe to give Type C constructive feedback to their boss then they either say nothing or use some variants of the D style.

How effective is that going to make you? How are you going to know much about how well you are performing as their manager?

So as Ed Catmull writes in his lovely book Creative Inc, “In the beginning, all our movies suck but because we have a culture of candour, we can improve them and make them fantastic.”

You have been reading the fifth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you?

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