The Employee Experience

How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results

Tracy Maylett, Matthew Wride

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119294207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmensentwicklung

Ever notice how companies with the best service also have the happiest employees? That's no accident.

Do you want to build a strong, successful organization? Start by ignoring your customers. Really. Instead, focus first on creating a better employee experience, or EX. Your employees interact with customers, make them smile, and carry your brand message from the warehouse to the front lines. If your employees are having a great experience, so will your customers.

In The Employee Experience, employee engagement pioneers Tracy Maylett and Matthew Wride reveal the secrets not only to attracting and retaining top talent, but to building a deeply engaged workforce—the foundation of organizational success. With deep insights into the dynamics of trust and mutual expectations, this book shows that before you can deliver a transcendent customer experience (CX), you must first build a superlative EX.

With real-world examples and more than 24 million employee survey responses, Maylett and Wride reveal a clear, consistent pattern among the world's most successful organizations. By establishing a clear set of expectations and promises—collectively known as the Contract—and upholding it consistently, employers can build the trust that leads to powerful engagement.

Whether in business, healthcare, education, sports, or nonprofit, these organizations are consistently more successful and more profitable, enjoy sustainable growth, and win the battle to keep today's rarest resource: talented people. Blending rigorous research, detailed case studies, in-depth interviews and expert insights, The Employee Experience will teach you to:

• Make the employee experience a core part of your strategy
• Understand employee expectations and bridge the "Expectation Gap"
• Establish rock-solid Brand, Transactional, and Psychological Contracts that breed trust and confidence
• Build an employee-employer partnership in creating something extraordinary
• Turn employee engagement into fuel for customer satisfaction, profit, and growth

Attracting talent, retaining top performers, and creating an environment in which employees choose to engage drives results. The Employee Experience shows you where truly extraordinary organizations begin…and how to build one.

TRACY MAYLETT, Ed.D, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, is the CEO of DecisionWise, where he currently advises leaders across the globe in leadership, change, and employee engagement. Maylett holds a doctorate from Pepperdine University and an MBA from BYU. He is a recognized author, and teaches in the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University.

MATTHEW WRIDE, JD, PHR, is the COO of DecisionWise. With an extensive business background, Wride brings a fresh approach to organization development and leadership consulting.He is passionate about helping leaders create winning employee experiences. Wride holds a JD from Willamette University and a master's degree from the University of Washington.

For over two decades, DecisionWise has advised organizations and leaders in more than seventy countries on leadership, assessment, talent, organization development, and the employee experience. Visit us online at www.decision-wise.com.

PART I

Great Expectations

CHAPTER 1
You’re Digging in the Wrong Place

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

—LEO TOLSTOY

The customer. It’s any person or group receiving a service from an individual or organization. If you run a company, it’s the person buying your T-shirts, pizza, or software. In healthcare, it’s the patient. In education, it’s the student. The customer in a not-for-profit may be the child in a remote village who receives food and medical care. In any case, the customer is the reason every organization exists—the reason people have a job to come to. So why are so many organizations (and people) doing such a terrible job giving the customer a wonderful experience?

We’re not talking about you, of course. Or maybe we are. Because most organizations have the same problem: They are desperate to win their customers’ loyalty and affection, but don’t know how to do it. Bribery with discounts doesn’t work. Innovation doesn’t work, because their competitors just out-innovate them. So they spend fortunes and waste years fishing for something that does work—and usually fail.

Still, a comparatively few organizations are getting it right. They win their customers’ loyalty and affection. They build brands that seem impervious to harm. What’s their secret? It’s right in front of them, and it’s right in front of you, too. It’s your employees. They are the secret to thrilled customers who boost profits, provide referrals, and who keep coming back. The trouble is, you’re probably not treating your employees as though this were true. We’re going to show you how to change that and, in the process, change everything.

But first, it’s time for a gratuitous pop culture reference.

CX (NOT INDIANA JONES) IS KING

If you read our book MAGIC: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement, you know we’re not above using examples from TV or movies to make a point. In that book, we cited the film Office Space as a memorable example of a completely disengaged workplace. At the risk of going to that particular well once too often, join us for a brief interlude in Cairo, the setting for an early part of the classic film Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In the scene, Indiana Jones and his friend Sallah have taken the golden headpiece of the Staff of Ra to a white-haired mystic, hoping he can decipher markings that will lead them to the Ark of the Covenant. When the old man translates the markings into instructions for the staff’s height, Indy and Sallah realize simultaneously that the staff the Nazis are using in their search is too long, thus giving them inaccurate information about the location of the Ark. They look at each other delightedly and in unison utter the memorable line: “They’re digging in the wrong place.”

When we began writing this book, we couldn’t get that phrase out of our heads. As we’ve watched hundreds of organizations obsess over Customer Experience (CX) and burn billions in their efforts, we couldn’t help but think “They’re digging in the wrong place.” It’s not that CX isn’t important; on the contrary, it’s absolutely crucial to profitability and growth. In fact, a 2015 report from Forrester illustrates this unambiguously¹. According to the findings, a one-point improvement in an industry’s Average CX Index™ Score is worth huge revenue increases to the companies within that sector.

We’re talking about $65 million in extra annual revenue for an upscale hotel chain, $118 million for a luxury auto brand, and a whopping $175 million a year in new revenues for a wireless service provider. To drive the point home, look at Harvard Business Review’s analysis, which asserts that a 1.3 percent improvement in customer satisfaction scores equals a 0.5 percent jump in revenue.²

No wonder everybody’s talking about the Customer Experience. You probably are. Your organization might even mention your commitment to improving CX on your website or in your mission statement. It makes sense, and we agree. Your customers should be the focus of your business, because without them, you don’t have a business. Sam Walton of Walmart fame said it best: “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” That’s precisely the reason so many organizations are putting so much time and effort into redefining and redesigning the Customer Experience.

Despite customer satisfaction being rocket fuel for the bottom line, organizations are burning billions in fruitless efforts to create a profit-boosting CX.

YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

Intuitively, each of us understands what it means to be disappointed by a poor Customer Experience or delighted by the employee who goes above and beyond the call. Given the potential upside, dumping man-hours and resources into CX seems like the no-brainer of all time. But is it, really? Can you engineer a superlative CX by throwing resources directly at the customer or by demanding that your downtrodden employees deliver service with a smile? Is it that simple?

Corporate leaders certainly seem to think so. One 2014 report forecasts that the market for CX management services and technology will grow from $4.36 billion in 2015 to $10.77 billion by 2020.³ That’s real money. Companies are spending lavishly on comprehensive CX strategies and building or buying high-tech systems in order to mine what they see as untapped veins of growth. And the data insist that this preoccupation with CX is justified: A report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index showed that leaders in customer service outperformed the Dow by 93 percent, the Fortune 500 by 20 percent, and the NASDAQ by a whopping 335 percent.⁴

However, the methods that many organizations are using to try to duplicate those glowing figures just aren’t delivering. According to The Consumer Conversation report, only 37 percent of businesses surveyed said they were “able to tie customer experience activities to revenue and/or cost savings.”⁵ That means the majority are, in effect, just spending money and keeping their fingers crossed. Meanwhile, an Accenture report concluded that, despite ambitious plans, about half the surveyed companies’ CX initiatives actually did little or nothing to retain customers or grow global revenues.⁶

What about outside the traditional corporate world, say, in healthcare? The news there is no better. A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers of more than 2,300 healthcare patients found that only half were satisfied with their overall experience as healthcare consumers. Ominously (for insurance companies, anyway), many were willing to try nontraditional sources for health insurance, including large retailers (40 percent of respondents) and digital companies like Amazon (37 percent).⁷

Despite customer satisfaction being rocket fuel for the bottom line, organizations are burning billions in unproductive efforts to create a profit-boosting CX. That’s what we mean by “digging in the wrong place.”

THROWING YOUR EMPLOYEES UNDER THE BUS

Consider the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). In 2013, the CTA spent $454 million to transition its 1.7 million daily riders from its own proprietary fare collection system to a third-party system owned and developed by a company called Ventra.⁸ But rather than saving money and time, the CTA only succeeded in enraging tens of thousands of Chicagoans.

The CTA’s mistake was that it focused on improving CX by increasing efficiency but did so without taking into account its employees—you know, the people who best knew its customers’ behavior, who knew that they were happy with the current system, and who would be on the front lines of customer anger and frustration. It was a costly miscalculation.

For example, buses were redesigned so that riders boarding through the front door would be automatically charged by electronic sensors as they passed by. No swiping cards—great, right? Sure, until you realize that on a crowded city bus, riders tend to use the fastest, most convenient exit. Unfortunately, the CTA didn’t talk to its bus drivers before installing the expensive system. If it had, it would have learned that many riders also exit through the front door. After the new system came online, many riders were inadvertently charged twice. Whoops.

Technical problems plagued the new system, and the CTA dropped the ball by making customer service available only between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays. Since many people ride the trains and buses in the evenings and on weekends, this decision left huge swaths of time that passengers couldn’t get help from a real person. In some cases, the customer service issues were tragicomic, including the experience of one passenger who started getting email after email telling him his new Ventra card was on the way, followed by a blizzard of mail: 91 envelopes, each containing a new card. The comedy of errors didn’t stop there. “The next day, 176 more [cards] arrived, each one, he later discovered, canceling the last. ‘You have to call and activate it,’ the rider told Crain’s Chicago Business, ‘but I’ve been afraid to do that....