Management consultants often refer to the Hawthorn Effect as the fact that productivity will improve when people are aware that someone is taking an interest and observing how they are performing in carrying out their tasks.
Similarly, The Pygmalion Effect is often applied in the business of performance improvement, where it isbelieved that leader expectations of employees may alter behaviour. A managers high expectation improves our behaviour and therefore our performance. It suggests that we do better when more is expected of us. Often referred to as self- fulfilling prophecy, managers strive to use the fact that setting higher expectations will lead to improved results.
Every business today strives for productivity improvement as a means of driving value. Whether your company delivers customer service, produces aircraft engines, writes software or sells and distributes beverages, the goal of any organisation today is to do more with less, and to deliver good quality results. One of the key drivers of productivity is management and employee behaviours. In fact, Gary Rogers, a very successful and one-time CEO of GE Plastics would define financial achievements as a result of behaviours, and would refer to results as a direct outcome of how the organisation behaved. “We behaved particularly well this year and managed to lift sales by 11%”, was how Gary would express performance achievement.
Many management consultancy companies also refer to behavioural change as a key driver in change projects and are said to be experts in behavioural change achieved through the application of a host of behavioural change methodologies. They often attribute results achievement as the “companies results” rather then their own, as the part consultants play in terms of improved results, is to facilitate behavioural change. However, behavioural change is a scarce resource, and correctly executed, is a powerful driver of value.
Behavioural change is often criticized on two fronts. The first is that the sustainability of behavioural change is often questioned. Then companies also often struggle with the concept of how to effect behavioural change through all the employees in the company, specially if the company employs thousands of people. It’s tough enough just to get a team of twenty account managers to change behaviours let alone three hundred development engineers or 3000 factory workers!
All our activities and efforts today are directed at delivering customer satisfaction by delivering on customer CTQ’s (Critical to Quality Requirements). In a bank, it’s about issue resolution, in the jet engine business it’s about on time delivery, in CPG it’s about On the Shelf Availability.
So, it therefore stands to reason that we need to bring customer expectations into our behavioural change reality. Again, favourable NPS, Net Promoter Scores is a solid indicator that our customers are satisfied with our performance. In fact, NPS or any alternative customer satisfaction index that you may decide to use as an indicator, also serves as a valuable feedback mechanism of how well customerservice is being delivered, or alternatively, how well we are behaving in terms of delivering to customer expectations. This is in fact a business success defining measure. We exist because of our customers. As a next step, we should be sensitive to the fact that there is a high correlation between high levels of employee satisfaction and high levels of customer service delivery.
It’s simply a matter of fact. Engaged employees deliver superior results. The graphic below underlines the fact that if our customer satisfaction scores are going in the wrong direction, the root cause is often disengaged employees.
Can employee engagement be measured? There are various surveys that can indicate whether employees are engaged and are satisfied. One key indicator, is simply the reluctance to participate in surveys. “Why should I participate? No one is listening anyway” is often an indicator of a disengaged employee. Another is a drop off in employee performance. So, there are multiple tools available that will indicate whether employees are engaged, satisfied and performing toexpectations. Some of the measures are:
• KPI-Evaluation
• 360 Reviews
• Feedback
• Course correction
Companies with highly engaged workforces outperform their peers by:
• 55% in NPS difference
• 147% in earnings per share
• 41% fewer errors
• 28% less waste
• 65% less turnover (low-turnover organizations)
• 25% less turnover (high-turnover organizations)
• 37% less absenteeism
The above pointers are significant motivators to change the way in which we manage employees and management is the key to success in this regard. Engagement is about understanding how our employees are feeling about their work environment and action plans to improve culture.
The graphic below underlines the challenge of mass behavioural change. How do you manage the quantum?
VirtlX has been created to fill the vacuum for a complete, real-time solution for experience management that is also affordable for SMEs and scalable to meet the needs of large corporates.
A dynamic, cloud-based tool, VirtlX brings real-time transparency around the metrics and responses of customers and employees and presents them in a manner that enables executives to make informed and rapid decisions. Data is gathered from internal and external surveys and presented in dynamic graphical formats that enable instant analysis and action.
A real-time “heat map” of results can be structured against critical KPIs, triggering pre-emptive action before issues develop into unrecoverable situations. Through the VirtlX platform you can monitor, manage and remediate the sentimental and developmental components of your KPIs, ensuring that you deliver a service that is always ahead of expectations.
The platform comprises three pillars:
• Perceive – Access corporate class customer feedback and analysis.
• Reflect – Gauge employee performance and wellbeing.
• Enrich – Build knowledge through bespoke online training.
The VirtlX Experience Index is a basic algorithm devised by Rison Software, portraying results in a scale from 0 to 10 with a weighting on the most regularly rated scores. Unlike NPS, there are no negative scores, which makes this approach resonate more readily with employees and facilitates the task of addressing performance issues for managers. As with NPS, VirtlX Perceive offers a number of reports to evaluate and understand customer sentiment from a Customer Experience Index perspective:
• Overall Report
• Graphical View
• Comparative – Rated Entity to Touchpoint
• Progressive Summary
• Trend Analysis
• Focus Areas
Encouraging and supporting employee engagement and wellbeing is good for people and the organisation. Stimulating and promoting wellbeing in the work environment can help to prevent stress and create positive working surroundings, where individuals and organisations can thrive.
Good health and wellbeing can be a core enabler of employee engagement and organisational performance, so measuring and understanding these dynamics is fundamentally important to a healthy company. VirtlX Reflect offers a report that easily portrays the outcomes of the surveys, orientated around seeking out these dynamics and presenting the results in a manner that is easy to interpret.
Various reports are presented in this aspect of the platform, allowing for a detailed insight from multiple perspectives. The reports available are:
• Overall Report
• Comparative – Rated Entity to Touchpoint
• Progressive Summary
• Trend Analysis
• Focus Areas
An example of the multitude of performance review templates available on the system, are 360° reviews:
For a company to fully understand the intricacies of what is going on from an employee perspective, 360° reviews are imperative, as they give individual employees a starting point for understanding which personal skills and behaviours they should address.
VirtlX offers an easy to configure and implement tool to rapidly review and assess employees on a 360° basis, highlighting performance metrics as well as assisting and identifying aspects of employee skill sets that require growth and improvement.
Data to build the reports may be originated from multiple sources:
• VirtlX Communicator tool – invitations created and sent by bulk email or SMS or WhatsApp, with easy to use, customisable templates
• Links from employees’ email signatures
• Embedded links in websites
• Embedded links in job cards
Finally, the platform allows companies to add a host of training programs onto the platform, as a means of taking corrective action by engaging employees on training interventions. The systems allows for corporates to load specific bespoke online training – create online, ongoing, relevant training for employees.
In the age of The Digital Employee, VIRTLX provides companies with an opportunity to continuously manage customer satisfaction, employee engagement and KPI achievement and combined with a training portal, achieves the elusive goal of delivering on a customer focused, sustainable mass behavioural change application, capable of measurably managing key aspects of performance improvement.
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About the Author:
Werner Hess is an experienced consultant who spent 20 years of his career in leading management positions with Bayer and General Electric. Thereafter he joined Proudfoot in business development and operations roles, before startling his own front-end focused consultancy, Carpedia Consulting. Werner worked with a host of international clients like ABB, Avaya, Canon, Henkel and Rockwell Automation, Diageo and KPMG. Delta Digital is an aggregator of digital solutions across the enterprise and works with clients to find the best solution fit for executing their business model. VIRTLX is a Delta Digital solutions partner.
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