engagement

ETC is at the heart of your employee experience.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

ETC

What kind of employee experience are we delivering? That has been the theme of my blog posts over the past 3-4 weeks.

A few years ago, MIT Sloan Management Review ran an article entitled “Designing the soft side of customer service”. In it the authors argue that regardless of whether we are talking a pizza delivery or a complex consulting agreement, emotions are lurking under the surface and that our job is to make those feelings positive.

If we are aiming to create the optimal customer experience, we will need to start off by examining the kind of employee experience that is going to be the foundation of the customer experience.

A miserable employee is not going to provide your customer with a breathtakingly positive emotional experience – no matter how much you train them.

But this is not just about the full employee journey: recruitment to exit-interview. As managers, we need to focus on the day to day experience as well.

We have looked at endings, consequences and psychological safety in previous posts, so this week let’s take a look at what else we can learn from the field of behavioural science that can help us understand what drives a great employee or customer experience.

You need to focus on the “ETCs”.

Emotions influence what we remember. Emotionally charged episodes are easy to recall. “Experiences” that triggered no emotional reaction, positive or negative, are quickly forgotten.
Basically our emotions are triggered when something turns out better or worse than we expected. And the corresponding emotional response is then either positive or negative. A good manager does her best to manage the emotions of her team – and sprinkles the day with a few unexpected positive surprises as well. Positive surprises are anything from throwing a pizza and beer party to celebrate a win, to the simplest little gests of encouragement during the day.

Trust is the basic psychological variable that is essential to any form of relationship. No trust, no relationship. If we want engagement, there needs to be trust. And trust is the mirror of how we show up on a day to day basis as human beings. Are we reliable? Do we do what we said we would do? Do we care for and stand up for our team?

Control over one’s environment and knowledge of how events are going to unfold are fundamental psychological needs. But control is also linked to trust. In a high trust environment, the need for control is less. There is one more aspect of control when we are talking employees and that is the sense that I have some degree of control over how I do my job. This is one of the foundational cornerstones of employee engagement.

Every situation in the day that involves uncertainty either in outcome or in process will cause our team members to experience a loss of control – and that closes the loop back to emotions because a sense of loss of control creates some very negative emotions.

So there it is, as a manager, I need to manage the emotions, trust and sense of control of my team if I want to make sure that they are in the best possible shape to create a fabulous customer experiences.

It sounds complicated, but it does not need to be – In our next manager’s toolbox workinar*, we will talk about some simple tools and tips that can help you do a much better job at this.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 14th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Employee experiences and why you need to focus on consequences

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Motivation
Last week, we looked at how progressive organisations are focusing on managing their employee experience as way to ensure the best possible customer experience. From a Service Profit Chain‘s point of view, this makes perfect sense.

We can create super sophisticated employee career journey maps – but we could also just look at what a day looks like on our team from an employee experience point of view. What are the emotional highs and lows in a day? So we looked at how managing positive ending has a huge influence on how the whole day is perceived.

This week, I would like to look at why managing the end of the day is just as or maybe even more important than managing the start of the day from a motivational point of view.

A reasonably accepted definition of motivation is:

“A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way”

So that reason, we call it the activator, for doing or not doing something can come from two main sources. It can be external; somebody does something to make you act (A request, a threat, a reward etc.). Or the activation comes from within yourself; you feel an inner urge to do something.

In either case, you end up doing whatever it is. That is the behaviour part. And all behaviour has a consequence. So there is this sequence: Activator – behaviour – consequence in everything we do.

In simple terms: You feel a craving for sweets. That activates you to get up and go to the cupboard and find a bar of chocolate. The consequence is that you feel good – your sugar craving is satisfied. (And, maybe you learn that eating chocolate is a solution for killing a sweet tooth.)

So now just pause for a minute.

What do you think has the largest influence on your behaviour on a day to day basis? The activator or the consequence?

If you are like most of the people I have in my workshops, you will say the Activator – We tend to think that we do things because there is a push. But that is not entirely correct.

80% of what we do or don’t do is determined by what we think the consequences are going to be. The drive is the consequence – that triggers the activator.

Ah, but that is not true, you may be thinking because I know that the consequences of eating chocolate is that I will get fat. So why do I still do it? Because we are all wired to value short-term consequences higher than long-term consequences. On top of that, we will value consequences that are certain, more than consequences that are a possibility in the future.

At 2 o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve – someone suggests that we crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels. The short-term well known consequence is that it is going to feel great. The long-term possible consequence is that we are going to feel terrible tomorrow.

That is also why it is hard to get people to stop smoking. The immediate 100% certain consequence is that they will feel a kick from the nicotine, the long term possible consequence is that it may kill them.

So back to managing our daily employee experience.

What do you think has the largest influence on our motivation to go to work? How the day starts (activation) or how the day ends (consequences)?

It’s a no brainer.

If we want our team to come in tomorrow, energised and ready to rock and roll, we need to think about how we manage the ending today. What was the consequence of their efforts today?

How are they going to feel when they go home: Elated, confident, positive? Or downcast, self blaming, frustrated and angry? Whatever it is, it is going to be our starting point tomorrow.

So how do we do a better job of managing our endings?

That is the subject of my upcoming tranings: The Manager’s Toolbox – you can join us and participate with your questions on comments live. Check it out here.

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This is the 12th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Exceeding expectations… of your followers

May 6, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Your success as a leader is closely associated with your ability to manage and live up to the expectations… of your followers.

We all know that we need to live up to or preferably exceed customer expectations.

But do we also understand that exactly the same mechanisms apply to the expectations of our followers?

ETC

From behavioural psychology, we know that there are three components that are important for humans when they evaluate an experience.

Emotions, trust and control.

Emotions influence what we remember, how we score encounters and the decisions we make. We all have explicit memories that we access about events, and implicit, or unconscious, emotional memories that characterise our feelings during those events. Emotionally charged episodes (both positive and negative) are often easily recalled.

Trust is a primitive psychological variable that is essential to any robust and enduring relationship. Without trust, there is often no engagement, only negative feelings such as anxiety and frustration. With trust comes a sense of comfort.

Control over one’s environment and knowledge of how events are going to evolve are fundamental psychological needs. Research shows that feelings of control (or lack thereof) can affect one’s health.

Control plays out in two forms: behavioural and cognitive.

Behavioural control means letting people have a say in how they do things (autonomy); and cognitive control is created by conveying information about the process or the outcome you can expect, i.e. as few negative surprises as possible.

What do they expect?

So with all this in mind, what are the expectations around you as a leader?

According to Mastering Leadership a book by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams, leaders need to understand that there are two sets of expectations: Explicit and implicit.

Explicit expectations are fairly straightforward. They are typically about accountability, responsibility, results, strategy and execution. The explicit expectations may even be listed in our job description.

But when your followers chose to follow you as a leader, they have implicit expectations in return for that followership. These expectations are typically about competence, fair treatment, commitment, engagement, listening, acting on suggestions, and providing inspiration, meaning, and direction.

But there is not a given list and it will vary from person to person.

Depending on how well you understand these expectations, you will influence their Emotions, Trust and sense of Control and thus ultimately their engagement.

How do you know what the implicit expectations are? Well that is exactly the point, you probably don’t. Because that is the nature of implicitness, they are not vocalised because they assume that you know…

So you need to ask.

Meaning you need to start a series of conversations with the people you lead with the aim to uncover their expectations – what do they need from you?

Eventually the goal is to make the implicit explicit, and then you will positively reinforce the three parameters: Emotion, Trust and Control.

And that is the way to generate a high level of engagement!

Why learning is your key to engagement

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

“When we grow people’s experience of competence, we inevitably grow their engagement”

– Ron Friedman.

A foundational piece of the Service Profit Chain is the dream team cycle: The seven steps that need to be in place in order for us to foster the kind of environment that ultimately will produce the best possible customer experience.

The third step of the cycle, Build Skills and Capacity, is all about the opportunities we give our people to develop and improve.

We all understand that training and development is useful when there is an obvious need to improve skills. But that is just one aspect. The other and possibly more important aspect is that personal growth and development is a key factor in securing engagement.

This is highlighted in the most recent Global Human Capital Trends 2016 Published by Deloitte University Press where 84% of executives surveyed rated learning as important or very important. This focus on learning comes as organisations see learning opportunities as a driver of engagement and strong workplace culture. Both are more than ever recognised as drivers of performance, according to the report.

“Compared to last year, companies appear to be making strides in adopting new technologies and embracing new learning models.”

That is also why in the Great Place to Work or Gallup engagement survey they ask employees if they have had the opportunity to grow and learn in the past year.

Unfortunately we see time and again that not many have had that opportunity.

It requires leadership capacity to provide learning opportunities for our people. It is not just a question of finding the budget to send them on a course. Learning and development happens mainly on the job. (Check out 70:20:10 – if you are not sure you agree).

It is by walking the precipice between our current abilities and the skills just beyond our reach that growth occurs. But that requires that you as a leader must design a path for your people that will take them out on that precipice from time to time. And that includes being there in case there is a need for a bit of hand-holding along the way.

But a first and even simpler step to ensure engagement in your team is to provide adequate feedback. Without feedback, we lack the crucial information needed in order to improve. And when we do not have a clear direction on what it is we need to do in order to succeed, it just a matter of time before we lose our engagement.

You can download your own Dream Team checklist here and benchmark yourself on how you are doing on all seven steps. The Dream Team Questions on a pdf – click here

Dream Team Questions

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