Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

5 Leadership Principles to Improve Customer Service

Each year, thousands of companies around the world – spanning the financial, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, retail, hospitality, communications, not-for-profit, government, and education spaces – celebrate Customer Service Week during the first full week in October. Although the 2019 Customer Service Week theme is “The Magic of Service,” strategies to improve customer service go beyond magic. In fact, the role of the team leader in customer service is significant, and certain leadership principles, including developing and managing teams that are positive brand extensions, illustrating demonstrated commitment to quality customer service, focusing on the employee experience, designing agile processes, and being visible are critical to a company’s efforts to recruit and retain customers.

Leadership Principle #1: Teams as Brand Extensions

Strong leaders understand that building and communicating a memorable brand is an essential piece of customer loyalty. However, when it comes to brand, many organizations “set and forget.” Instead, leaders should take steps to evaluate the company’s current value proposition, analyze how it stacks up to the competition, and vet it to ensure authenticity and consistency with actual company practices. Then, they must select team members who complement one another in embodying the brand, and reward employees who display and share core brand attributes. For example, savvy leaders know that customer service representatives who dress fashionably and speak articulately will bolster a sleek, on trend, and forward thinking brand.

Leadership Principle #2: Commitment to Quality Customer Service

Customer Service Week can present a fresh opportunity to re-commit to quality service from the top-down. Ideally, leaders reinforce stellar customer service on a regular basis through company-wide messaging and activities. They have outlined what customer service looks like in their organization and strive to improve on measured results. Leaders are willing to invest in adequate staffing, equipment, and software so representatives are set up for success, and are dedicated to leveraging new technologies to facilitate omnichannel communication and strategic automation with the goal of faster and more targeted customer service.

Leadership Principle #3: Focus on the Employee Experience

Business mogul Richard Branson once said, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” The employee experience, or what a company’s people do and how they feel over the course of recruitment, onboarding, learning, performance, and transitions, is a necessary focus for customer-oriented leaders. For instance, good leaders facilitate a hiring experience that attracts employees with the right combination of skills and traits to excel in customer service. And, leaders who support an employee experience that highlights collaboration and continuous learning via applicable training will typically have more customer savvy team members.

Leadership Principle #4: Agile Processes

Just like customer service is an attitude, so is agility, and strong leaders must keep their eyes on big picture business objectives while recognizing that evolving market forces require more frequent adaptation than in the past. Not only should leaders design customer-facing processes that make it easier to respond to changing requirements in real time, but they should also empower representatives to make in-the-moment decisions and innovate on behalf of a customer. Rigidly constructed policies aren’t the hallmark of good leadership or service, so this Customer Service Week, perhaps take the opportunity to rethink them.

Leadership Principle #5: Visibility

Beyond Customer Service Week, effective leaders show up for employees and customers alike. This means putting in face time at your place of business, conversing with staff and clients, and paying attention to small details like birthdays and professional moves. Even if a leader has the most competent frontline employees imaginable, there’s no substitute for an owner who takes the time to get to know and spend time with the people who matter to the business. Hosting team building outings and customer appreciation events provides an excellent forum for owners to interface with the community and humanize their enterprises.

There are a variety of ways to improve customer service, but this Customer Service Week, consider the role that solid leadership plays in driving it. By honing agility and visibility and placing a spotlight on branding, employee experience, and commitment to quality service, you’ll be the most trusted and admired of business owners.

3 Innovative Business Trends for 2020

Remember when the year 2020 seemed incredibly far away? Sure enough, if we'd read about this year's new business trends in the late '90s, we might have thought they were pretty futuristic.

A few developments—including the artificially intelligent voice economy, democratized IT and enhanced social video—became reality in the last few years and form the basis of future business trends in 2020 and beyond. 

AI-Powered Voice Economy

Proactive voice response systems have long been a part of customer service. A proactive response from a machine prompts a human to ask a question. Then the machine answers and then asks a follow-up question.

For example, a customer might call a drugstore to order a prescription refill. The machine would offer the customer options; the customer could choose one, such as “Do I have a refill available?" and the machine could respond “Yes, there is one refill available. Can I fill the prescription for you?"

Phone-based customer service “robots" were once clunky and fussy, but the technology behind them is rapidly advancing. This progress is mostly due to improvements in natural language processing (NLP), or a machine's ability to process human speech patterns.

Artificially intelligent voice-based assistants like Alexa and Siri are taking off because if you think about it, it's much easier for humans to communicate with digital devices and software by voice than by typing onto a screen. Your assistant sits quietly in the background until you ask for its help, and thanks to NLP, it can respond to you far more accurately than in the past.

For the rest of the innovations, head over to the AMEX Business site.

Emphasizing Cognitive Diversity: Can It Be Taught?

A few years ago, I worked with The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative (BJKLI) and The Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion on a survey that sought to provide modern context around the notions of diversity and inclusion. Among other things, the research asked nearly 4,000 global professionals of all levels, ages, genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations how they define these terms.

It might not come as a surprise that most baby boomers and even X-ers (read: the chronologically older people in the workforce today) think representation and assimilation when they consider the notion of diversity. Millennials tend to view it a bit differently, though. For them, workplace diversity and inclusion go beyond ensuring that people of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations are welcomed into the organization.

While this form of diversity is obviously important and essential, millennials also value the respect and consideration given to employees as individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives. This is referred to as cognitive diversity, and it means that employees can come to work and share their ideas, philosophies, and contributions as their complete selves – without fear of negative consequences.

Over the last few years, the workplace in general has improved when it comes to fostering cognitive diversity. I think we have the millennials to thank for that, because they now comprise a majority of the global workforce and are entering leadership positions – and disrupting them – and average of ten years earlier than members of prior generations. That being said, it’s not unusual to hear someone like a young, transgender, first generation American raised in a rural environment say they feel misunderstood and ignored in a big city corporation because “apparently I don’t have the background, experience or tenure to be taken seriously.”

Fortunately, though, not only can cognitive diversity be taught, but it can be systematically integrated into an organization’s culture. The first step is to educate baby boomer and Gen X-er leaders about cognitive diversity and its benefits. Once leaders fully understand why it’s good for business to be as inclusive as possible, they can acknowledge the limitations of hierarchies and minimize barriers to communication and engagement.

Rather than making critical decisions in a vacuum, leaders should take care to include voices and votes that are truly representative of the employee population. This is especially important when it comes to innovation, as many of the freshest ideas come from unexpected places. They should establish cross-functional pilot projects or committees that seek to improve business outcomes through diverse collaboration, and finally, they should put online and offline feedback mechanisms in place so all employees feel comfortable and encouraged sharing real-time thoughts.

Of course, if you’re working for a company that hasn’t mastered hiring diverse employees in the first place, you can’t put the cart before the horse. First and foremost, you must continue your work to ensure you have a population from which to solicit cognitively diverse perspectives.

Did you miss our webinar on the next generation of diversity and inclusion? Catch the replay and let us know what you think!

 

2020 Best Practices in Workforce Management

The global workforce today is anything but static. Both HR professionals and individual managers must continuously adjust employment configurations in response to evolving business conditions and increase their applied technology skills – meaning they understand how to leverage available software to manage their workforces more efficiently. At the same time, 21^st century business developments have mandated a focus on a more sophisticated employee experience that provides meaningful interaction for all types of hires at all stages of the employment lifecycle.

Visiting the KronosWorks annual customer conference to promote The Workforce Institute’s new book, “Being Present: A Practical Guide for Transforming the Employee Experience of Your Frontline Workforce,” I dug more deeply into the specific mechanics of the 2020 hourly workforce and devised these considerations for frontline managers.

Administrative Automation

Timekeeping and scheduling are perhaps the most obvious uses of hourly workforce automation. A target software solution should facilitate tracking, managing, and optimizing employee time (including hours worked, absences, employee preferences such as desired location, job type, and hours, and skills/certifications needed to do the job). Similarly, a scheduling component can improve your ability to forecast accurately, distribute your labor more effectively and minimize mistakes due to human error. Administrative automation can streamline your payroll process to ensure timely and accurate payments, file the appropriate taxes, and minimize compliance risk. It can also simplify your compensation management for greater visibility and governance and help you keep up with Affordable Care Act (ACA) compliance with enhanced benefits administration, reporting, and auditing.

Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning

When analytics capability is organically present in your workforce management solution (as opposed to layering a different solution on top of it), it’s easier and faster to collect consistent and reliable data, create insightful visualizations, and measure progress on goals that matter to the business. And, workforce management software is getting smarter all the time, examining your data through a variety of lenses and making original and proactive recommendations based on what’s happening right now as well as your employees’ preferences.

Systems Integration

While there are certainly enough HR technology vendors to cobble together any sort of configuration you want, I feel it’s essential that a workforce management software integrate closely with all the data sources that feed into and influence it. Therefore, it makes sense that the best solution is housed in the cloud, able to plug into your existing technology infrastructure and use open APIs to extend platform functionality.

Employee Experience Management

Speaking of integrated functionality, your employees will have a more intuitive, less confusing experience if your solution facilitates a consistent process of engagement through recruitment, onboarding, workforce management, learning, payroll, and performance. The talent acquisition piece, including application and candidate relationship management, interview scheduling, offer delivery and negotiation, and pre-start communication is particularly critical since it’s potential hires first glimpse into the tech-savviness of your organization and can absolutely mean the difference between securing the best talent and losing it to a competitor.

Managing a frontline workforce in the 2020s may be a challenge unlike any you’ve faced before, but the good news is, the right tools can reduce the complexity, reduce time to productivity, and help retain the strongest workers longer.

Why We Haven’t Fixed Our Diversity Problems

I’ll be the first to say I don’t have all the answers when it comes to diversity and inclusion. I don’t think anyone does, but least of all me. The closest I’ve come to discrimination is being told I had to be three times as smart, competent, and amusing as male speakers because I was a small, young-looking woman. And, sometimes people ask “odd” questions about my religion (Judaism).

But just because we don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions. The question I’m constantly addressing with other human capital experts today involves why we haven’t made greater progress with respect to D&I in the organizational setting.

It doesn’t quite make sense. After all, the business case has been clear for decades. Diverse organizations perform better, are more innovative, and have more engaged employees. In terms of our collective degree of tolerance for those different than ourselves, we’ve come a long way. We now even have software that’s supposed to help us mitigate unconscious bias. So why is D&I still such a thorny problem? Here are three speculations.

Issue #1: We focus too much on recruitment.

Most organizations understand the need to solicit talent from diverse sources and are successful at doing just that. Thanks to new partnerships with high schools, universities, associations, and community groups we may never have engaged with in the past, new employees come in the door looking and thinking differently. Here’s the thing, though. What happens after these diverse hires start? Usually, they’re simply swallowed up by the system. We fail to create an onboarding experience that’s customized to be rewarding to the individual, we don’t provide them with the right skill acquisition and we don’t provide mentors to whom they can relate. So they leave – often with  speed and disillusionment – and we are forced to start over with fresh recruits.

Issue #2: We make D&I a program rather than a culture.

This second problem is related to why diverse hires don’t stay. The D&I “function” is often relegated to a single person, or maybe a team, that’s responsible for creating initiatives. Beyond talent acquisition, such programs might include affinity groups and unconscious bias training. But many employees, especially those in the millennial generation, find a narrow focus on D&I stranger than no focus at all. A 28-year-old recently told me: “When I work at a company, I just want to walk into the lobby and see all kinds of people. I should have no idea whether they’re in the c-suite or a cube based on how they look. It’s weird when a company tries too hard, you know? We’re a diverse country, why isn’t this more natural?” And how do we make it “more natural,” exactly? The importance of D&I must be embedded in the organization’s vision and goals, consistently communicated from the top, and reflected in measurement of performance.

Issue #3: We’re creating biased software.

Hiring and performance management software that removes common barriers to inclusion and prompts us to awareness of potential bias is no doubt a brilliant invention. But this software is currently designed and programmed by a very non-diverse pool of people from a limited number of organizations, and this setup has the potential for technology to make bias worse. If we truly want to leverage algorithms as partners in this cause, educational institutions and software companies need to train and employ developers who accurately represent today’s employee populations. This is the only way to ensure that the resulting products come to the table with the right lens.

Want to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of the next generation of D&I? Join SilkRoad’s human capital futurist Alexandra Levit for a free webinar on December 10, 2019 at 2PM EST.

Your Workforce: Global Demographic Changes Can't Be Denied

When people talk about workforce disruptions, they’re usually referring to technology advances or evolving work structures and environments. Rarely does anyone mention demographic changes, even though these are primary drivers of who is available to work and where. Let’s look at the big ones impacting the future of work that are sweeping the globe.

The Rise and Fall of Fertility

In many western nations, the birthrate has dropped below replacement levels, meaning that each pair of adults will have fewer than two children, causing the native-born population to decrease. While population may not decrease in industrialized countries due to immigration, the resulting workforce may have different work preferences and abilities – potentially resulting in geographic skills mismatches (i.e. organizations in a given area require skills that are not readily available in their location). At the same time, fertility rates continue to increase in countries like China and India, leading these developing nations to become the leading exporters of skilled talent working in the professional gig economy by the mid-21^st century.

Boomers Exit Stage Right

The baby boomers, born roughly 1946-63, have taken longer than expected to retire from their traditional, full-time occupations. Two factors are at play here. First, many boomers lost savings in the recession and needed to work more years to support a much longer lifespan. Second, because they are healthy, many want to continue to contribute to the workforce. Rather than allowing this immense amount of institutional knowledge circle the drain, organizations would be smart to leverage boomers in part-time mentoring and consulting roles.

For more, visit the SilkRoad blog.

The Evolution of Recruiting from 2009-2019

In 2008, I published a book with ATD Press called Success for Hire. Since then, I’ve followed the field closely and for this article, wanted to consider some of the major recruiting changes that have taken place over the last decade.

The “Black Hole of HR” is No More

When I entered this field, I advised candidates never to blindly submit a resume to a job board or an applicant tracking system (ATS). At the time, doing so was often a guarantee that no human eyes would ever rest on your materials. Today, however, ATS are far more sophisticated in sorting and funneling resumes to the appropriate decision-makers, and whether the news is good or not, candidates are more likely to hear it. And, the job boards that still exist are no longer “boards” persay, but rather matching platforms offering a suite of helpful services to both job seekers and recruiters find one another.

Social Facilitates Passive Recruitment

Remember the days when recruitment processes happened in a very specific order – employer posts job, candidates apply, employer decides who to interview?  The rise of social media, especially sites like LinkedIn, has enabled employers and candidates to engage in a mutual selection process that often begins with the recruiter scoping out the skillsets and recommendations of and reaching out to people who aren’t looking for work. Passive candidates are also more likely to be spotted by recruiters via their participation in online communities, hosted events, and skills showcases.

Artificially Intelligent Software Mitigates Bias

Unconscious bias has always tarnished recruitment efforts. While most employers didn’t mean to discriminate against a candidate because of their gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, this often happened at the subconscious level. Now, though, some intelligent software programs remove resume details – such as names, photos, and education – that might lead to biased assessments. Others help recruiters word job descriptions in a certain way, and combat interview selection bias via structured conversational prompts and real-time video assessments of interviewer speech and body language.

The Total Employee Experience Starts with Candidates

Once, employers held all the cards and had all the power. If your company had a website or was in the news, you were golden. But in 2019, recruiters must work hard to convince top talent to invest their careers with an organization. To start, organizations must have a consistent, reputable, transparent, and compelling employer brand, and they then must showcase that brand through a carefully orchestrated hiring process that makes individual candidates feel respected, valued, and cared for. And – that process must transition into preboarding and onboarding experiences that make new hires feel good about their decisions prepare them to contribute right away.

If you’re interested in recruitment and didn’t catch last week’s webinar with SilkRoad client Sonepar, grab the replay here and let us know what you think!

Talent Assembly as Recruitment 2.0

For most of recruiting’s history, in some ways all jobs were created equal. If your organization needed a human worker, you solicited qualified candidates to work full-time, onsite at your location, with the expectation that they’d be there for the foreseeable future.

Traditional employees still exist, of course. But due to a combination of demographic shifts and technology advances, the recruitment role has become exponentially more complicated.

I’ve talked about the rise of the gig economy for a while, but new surveys keep supporting its growth. For instance, a 2018 NPR study found 1 in 5 jobs in America is held by a contract worker and predicted that within a decade, contractors and freelancers will make up half of the workforce. 

This shift means that instead of relying on traditional employees to perform most organizational responsibilities, most companies are moving to a hybrid approach that includes temporary, contract, and virtual employees, as well as consultants and subject matter experts. And recruiters, still housed mostly within the HR function, are being called upon to quickly construct teams in response to immediate business priorities.

Rapid talent assembly, which fits perfectly into the agile operations model embraced by many forward-thinking organizations, has many benefits. You can source talent when and where you need it, and it doesn’t matter that the best person for the job doesn’t live near your New York headquarters. When a project is finished, you don’t have to continue paying the employee. You don’t need a crystal ball requiring next year’s staffing requirements, and you don’t have to spend your profits on unnecessary overhead and benefits.

But how do you do talent assembly exactly? In my new book about the future of work, Humanity Works, I discuss an example of a network set up by an individual organization for the express purpose of talent assembly. The Washington Post Talent Network, which is part social network and part job board, was designed to give Post editors an easy way to solicit and hire external writers for blogs, breaking news, and long features across a variety of departments.

The system includes freelancer profiles, detailing professional experience and including work samples; story pitching, allowing freelancers to tailor ideas for specific departments and editorial initiatives; assignment posting, letting freelancers consider stories the Post would like to pursue; and location tracking, ensuring editors know freelancers’ primary work locations for quick deployment of breaking news.

If you don’t have or can’t build a network of your own, several excellent sites can help with your sourcing, including:

Freelancer.com: After acquiring vWorker and Scriptlance, this is the world’s biggest global outsourcing resource.

Upwork: When oDesk.com and Elance.com merged, Upwork was the result. Like Freelancer.com, the employer support and service are terrific and the site takes only a small cut for matched projects.

Guru.com: Going beyond the more typical freelancer occupations, this site matches subject matter experts with employers.

TopTal: If you need skilled software development talent, TopTal employs a rigorous screening system and matches the top 3 percent of tech applicants with short and long-term employer projects.

If you’d like to learn more about why recruitment is such a critical part of your overall talent strategy, join me and SilkRoad client Sonepar for a free webinar tomorrow, September 17^th at 2PM EST.

The Forgotten Transitions: New Managers, New Responsibilities

In an ideal world, every employee would be solidly prepared for a transition involving a promotion or new roles and responsibilities. And yet so often, we leave this to chance. We hope that the person in charge will make sure the employee has all of the right information, tools, and support to perform the new job effectively.

Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen. Employees are expected to figure it out, and many get overwhelmed, burned out, and demotivated in the process. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that – due to baby boomer retirement and other workforce demographic shifts – rising millennial leaders are being promoted an average of 10 years earlier than prior generations and have a steeper learning curve as a result.

Fortunately, providing a high tech, high touch experience for new managers and others transitioning to new roles and responsibilities can be a relatively seamless extension to your existing strategic onboarding activities.  Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Provide relevant, on-demand learning content in a variety of formats

Whether you’ve created online courses in short or long format or have curated resources from other places, use your HRMS to offer employees their choice of training, being as flexible as you can regarding how and where they master the necessary information. Outline essential competencies, track training completion and skill acquisition, and suggest next steps.

Match employees with those already doing their new jobs

Your HMIS is a great place to pair newbies with seasoned managers or those performing especially well in a job function. Both formal and informal mentorship is useful in helping transitioning employees see a clear path forward and feel comfortable, supported, and confident in their new roles.

Document expectations and goals

Employees with new roles and responsibilities should understand exactly what they need to accomplish in the context of the larger organization, when specific goals must be achieved, how performance will be measured, and how other people (managers, reports, colleagues, etc.) will be involved. These details, highly customized to each new role, should be proactively communicated and reinforced.

Schedule and execute more frequent check-ins to accommodate assimilation

Managers of transitioning employees should be prompted to pay extra attention to those ramping up in a new position. This might include weekly in-person or video discussions that address both the personal and professional demands of the new job. Topics might include time management, cross-departmental rapport building, and leader-facing communication.

Demonstrate psychological comprehension

While there’s no substitute for a leader taking a new manager to lunch with inquiring after her well-being, software can go a long way in illustrating that your organization understands the obstacles and pressures of a new role and wants to be a partner in alleviating them.  For instance, an embedded app that serves up a motivational “quote of the day” could set an important tone for an employee’s new journey.

Did you miss last week’s webinar on managing effective transitions? Catch the replay here and let us know what you think!

How to Prepare for Leadership Disruption

As a futurist and the host of the Workforce 2030 podcast, I’m frequently asked the most important trait leaders need to develop to effectively govern 21^st century workforces. The answer is easy: agility. The business world’s only certainty is that the environment WILL change quickly, and the fastest way to organizational obscurity and failure is to deny that major disruptions are bound to occur and that regular strategy pivots will be essential.  These questions will help leaders navigate a climate in which an approach that worked yesterday is unlikely to work the same way tomorrow.

Is My Organization Agile Enough to Shift Direction Rapidly?

Many companies are bureaucratic and unwieldy, where one must wade through layers of hierarchy before receiving the green light to change a process. As we move toward 2030, the pace of change will demand real-time monitoring of markets and customer demands, as well as infrastructures and mechanisms to drive immediate action when an approved strategy no longer serves.

Have I Customized My Management Style?

We have moved from a workforce of many to a workforce of one. Today’s employees are more diverse than ever. They have different work arrangements, personal priorities, and career aspirations. Leaders must tailor their styles to the individual rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all approach, and they must be willing to diligently supervise multi-generational, virtual, remote, and contract teams as well as traditional full-time, onsite ones.

For the rest of the article, check out the SilkRoad blog.