Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Using Design Thinking for Product Innovation

Most business owners would agree that product innovation is important to their success in today's world.

History is full of companies that were initially very successful but failed to innovate when the market changed, says Jeremy Brandt, founder and CEO of We Buy Houses, an online service that connects home sellers with potential buyers. And that informs the way his company operates.

“At We Buy Houses, we continuously identify ways to improve our products, taking technology we've built internally for ourselves and turning it into a commercial product for our clients," says Brandt.

“Agile and similar methodologies are great for consistently moving the ball forward," he continues. "Innovation is about coming up with new ideas, processes and products to stay ahead of the competition and in line with what the market needs. Once the innovation happens, it's all about execution, and that's where agile plays a huge role."

Design thinking is an agile product innovation methodology traditionally used by designers to solve complex problems. It is a solution-focused and action-oriented way of creating a preferred future.

Over the years, design thinking has taken on many faces, but the Institute of Design at Stanford University proposed a groundbreaking and now frequently used series of steps, which are:

Empathize

Empathize mode is the first step on your product innovation journey. Here you're trying to understand your customers' physical and emotional needs, how they think about the world and what is meaningful to them.

Observing what people do and how they interact with their environment can give you clues. You can engage your users by preparing some questions you'd like to ask, for instance:

• If you are standing in line at the grocery store, what app are you most likely to view first and why?

For the rest of the steps, head over to the AMEX OpenForum.

Tapping Into Global Business Innovation

Before the internet, most innovation took place in small communities, with isolated breakthroughs eventually spreading throughout the world. Today, however, global business innovation is the norm.

Business owners pursuing growth may want to make a habit of looking around them—and not just at local competitors. How other companies around the world do business can affect your organization.

I spoke to two business owners to understand how they tap into global business innovation to power their companies.

Stepping Out of Your Communal Bubble

Fabrizio Moreira is the owner of The Moreira Organization, a nonprofit that develops world leaders. He has learned that everything a business owner touches involves a global team of talent—from manufacturing to storing data in the cloud.

“This global talent pool means you're competing with a lot of innovators who you ignore at your peril," Moreira says. “Many emerging markets are leapfrogging established markets because of need-based innovation and fewer existing infrastructure constraints," Bullen says. “Paying attention to what these markets are doing can help you identify opportunities in your own market as well as threats that may be down the line."

He seeks out intelligence on global business innovation by observing similar organizations operating in other countries, and finding ways to plug in and work with them.

Erik Bullen is CEO of MageMail and is actively involved in the start-up and innovation community, mentoring and advising for programs such as Techstars, MassChallenge and LaunchX. His ideation is regularly informed by other cultures, markets and industries.

“Many emerging markets are leapfrogging established markets because of need-based innovation and fewer existing infrastructure constraints," Bullen says. “Paying attention to what these markets are doing can help you identify opportunities in your own market as well as threats that may be down the line."

For more where this came from, check out the AMEX OPENForum.

5 Customer Service Skills You Can Improve

In a world that's increasing its degree of automation every day, the value of human interaction is greater than ever. That's why having strong customer service skills is important—and why improving those skills can be a valuable goal for the new year.

Those who excel at customer service may differ in their level, role and industry, but they typically have these competencies in common.

1. Business Knowledge

If you aren't well-informed about your customer's business issues, consider making that a priority for 2018. You can read industry-related publications and relevant social media accounts and/or company materials. You could also interview colleagues about what they've learned.

 

If you're in doubt about challenges a customer is facing, ask. Showing extra interest and investment in their business can enhance your customer service skills, as can taking the additional step of questioning an existing process or situation in favor of continuous improvement.

2. Empathy

There is no substitute for being able to effectively communicate that you understand where your customer is coming from and that you will do everything in your power to help.

Your level of sincerity can make or break your efforts. Listening carefully to the customer's scenario and imagining how you'd feel in her shoes can help you boost your empathy.

It also helps to pay attention to tone and to read between the lines. Consider gently asking questions and paraphrasing back what you hear. And if the customer just needs to get something off her chest, try letting her.

3. Self-Control

Customers can be infuriating sometimes, but those with stellar customer service skills rarely, if ever, lose their cool. "It's important for service representatives to practice emotional control because they are essentially representing the entire organization," says Emily Bennington, author of Miracles at Work: Turning Inner Guidance into Outer Influence. "It helps to recognize that what we tend to view as a personal attack from a customer isn't really personal at all—they're frustrated with the business. Maintaining that perspective can help you hold your composure no matter what."

For more where this came from, visit the American Express OPENForum.

 

The Strategic Elevation of HR

I’ve recently had the opportunity to work more closely with DeVryWORKS, which offers organizations solutions to acquire and retain the best talent, plan for succession, and close skills gaps. One thing has become very clear in recent years: the strategies organizations used yesterday to recruit, manage, and retain top people won’t work today. Increasingly, employees are looking not just for a job they like, but an experience that’s meaningful. Thanks to analytics tools, we are in a better position than ever to measure whether our initiatives are working as intended, and it’s especially critical that we are agile in the face of a continuously evolving business climate.

Moving forward, I will publish one article a week here on topics of utmost concern to leaders and talent management professionals like you. Sometimes I’ll aim to help you build a business case for strategies you already know are imperative, and other times, I will introduce a new idea you might not have considered before. 

Let's start with a piece on how HR is changing. If you have been in the human resources profession for a while, you might have heard the legend of how HR originally became a thing. Allegedly, around the turn of the 20^th century, The National Cash Register Company had a strike to which it responded by launching a “Personnel Department.” The new division was responsible for regulating wages, ensuring a safe work environment, keeping employee records, and responding to grievances.

The HR function did not change for the better part of 100 years. While other functional areas grew and expanded, HR largely remained static and administrative in nature. If a new employee was starting or one was leaving, you contacted HR staff. Otherwise, you rarely (if ever) interfaced with them.

As the economy has improved and skills shortages have increased, however, the competition for top talent has intensified. Now, effective talent management across the employee lifecycle – from recruiting and onboarding to learning and performance, has become a c-suite imperative. By necessity, leaders are calling on HR to advise on critical matters related to the longstanding competitiveness and overall success of the organization.

In other words, the HR function has been elevated strategically so that every operation supports the larger business goals. But while many HR professionals grumbled about “not having a seat at the table” for decades, now that the seat has been granted, some aren’t sure how to contribute in the most effective way. If this is your situation, here are some recommendations to get started:

Know Your Business

Many HR professionals only know HR – and at a basic level at that. HR leaders who have the ear of the CEO, on the other hand, have a solid understanding of their companies’ position in the industry, how they are run, their unique histories, their products and services, and the roles that various functions play in achieving the organizations’ goals. If they don’t have experience with a function (finance, for instance), they are proactive in learning more about it. This deeper body of knowledge allows them to provide more meaningful talent management guidance to other leaders.

Know Your Customers

The most strategic HR professionals have a handle on both their internal and external customers. Speaking with representatives in other departments, they’ve become well-versed in the profiles of those who purchase their company’s products and services, those who apply to work at the organization, and those who are currently employed there.

Think Beyond Tactics

Far too often, HR is guilty of launching initiatives without a broader context, which are developed in a vacuum. Continuous improvement is good, but make sure there is a method to your madness. For example, an HR leader shouldn’t implement a shiny new applicant tracking system without first doing research on how individuals are currently hired into the organization.

Focus on the Employee Experience

Employee experience design involves thoughtfully considering what employees should feel and do at each stage of the employment lifecycle to maximize engagement, productivity, and retention. The old HR way involved a series of unrelated and isolated actions (i.e. an employee’s orientation agenda did not address the goals that would later be addressed in his or her performance review), but the new way is continuous and connected.

Involve Managers Everywhere

It is well known that the most critical factor in retention is the manager/employee relationship. Strategic HR leaders facilitate these relationships from the get go, ensuring that managers are mentally present for new hires and are taking specific actions to ensure that employees effectively assimilate into the organization and receive appropriate guidance throughout their tenures.

Pilot and Measure Innovative Projects

Strategic HR professionals understand that current processes and procedures – especially manual ones – have a limited shelf life, and that today’s HR organizations must be agile in their response to constituent needs. They constantly aim to do things in a new way, often taking a promising idea and implementing it on a small scale (for example, an onboarding portal rolled out initially to the marketing department) to see how it will play. And most importantly, they know that building a business case for a new initiative requires knowing how to use Big Data and analytics tools to measure a pilot’s success.

HR is most strategic when everything it touches has business implications. If you find yourself constantly being asked to collaborate, that’s a good thing. It means you are headed in the right direction.

 

Healthcare: Can You Prevent Quick Quits?

Hiring and retaining new employees are daunting tasks for most healthcare organizations for a variety of reasons. To start, many are struggling with major skills shortages and even sourcing the proper talent to fill open positions can be an uphill battle. And then, the hiring process in healthcare organizations often takes so long that new employees either take another job instead or leave within the first few months.

Resignations that take place within the first three to six months of employment are known as “quick quits,” and given their challenges, it’s critical that healthcare organizations do everything in their power to prevent these rapid-fire resignations. The key is, of course, strategic onboarding in the form of KSR – knowledge, support, and relationships. Let’s look at each of these three components.

Knowledge

Most healthcare workers join an organization enthusiastic to contribute to the best of their ability. However, if they don’t receive proper training and direction, as well as clarity around their roles and responsibilities, they may find themselves at loose ends and wishing they’d taken a different position. In addition to general information about the organization and its policies, your onboarding initiative should include a review of expectations for what new hires are expected to accomplish in a given job. Managers should ensure that these expectations and goals align with what was discussed during the interview process. And because uninformed employees are more likely to be disengaged, there should be an ongoing and seamless flow of role-related information from organization to manager to employee.

Support

Through its work with healthcare organizations, Gallup observed that the rapid changes in the healthcare industry have adversely affected two critical items of employee engagement: knowing work expectations and connecting with the company’s mission.

Providing this type of information is an important way to offer appropriate support, but managers should also ask each new hire, regularly, what they can do to make his or her job easier. Proactively, new employees should be pointed in the direction of key resources that will help them get around common problems or roadblocks, and managers should be on the lookout for the stress reactions that often occur during times of transition – especially in high-pressure healthcare environments.

For the rest of this post, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Performance is a Cultural Variable

co-founder and CEO Mollie Lombardi described a culture of performance as a set of behaviors that are rewarded or discouraged by the people, processes, and systems within an organization. To create and foster a performance culture, Lombardi suggested focusing on the following conditions for success.

Alignment

According to new Aptitude research, alignment on culture is a major challenge: only 38 percent of organizations said that leaders and employees would describe their culture in the same way. On a related point, 53 percent of senior leaders said performance expectations are clearly communicated, but only 34 percent of employees said the same.  Leaders are in denial, and it doesn’t help that while 60 percent of companies have executive level oversight of client experience, only 37 percent have an executive level role focused on workplace culture and employee engagement.

Employee Experience

Eighty-one percent of top performing companies said they measure the experience of candidates, employees, managers, and leaders. When an experience doesn’t resonate, it’s often because we are using a one-size-fits-all model. Lombardi advised that we must do a much better job tailoring messages, recognizing that employees have a singular experience throughout their day. And the only experience that matters is theirs.

In addition to catering to the needs of the individual rather than the collective group, we can create a better experience by bridging the gap between employer and employee through more frequent and bidirectional communications, and creating an easier process for individuals to do their work, engage with others, and drive performance. The best employee communications are consistent in message but vary in format (depending on information consumption habits) and are supported by a strategic technology implementation.

For more of Lombardi's insights, check out the full post on the SilkRoad blog.

You Need Analytics' Answers

A reader said on a recent webinar:

 My company is scared of people analytics. What if the results show that something is really wrong?

People analytics involves the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to determine patterns and predict future outcomes and trends. It’s now possible to examine data regarding recruitment, performance, employee mobility, and other factors, and use it to determine what does (and doesn’t) drive business results.

People analytics holds the promise of incredible value. It’s not hard to get started, and analytics implementations are known to pay for themselves far more quickly than other types of technology. Yet there is fear: fear of risk and compliance issues, fear of a lack of available talent to leverage data insights, and fear that data is simply too “all over the place.”

But the biggest fear of all is exactly what this participant articulated: that having accurate measurements of talent management practices will reveal weaknesses. This scenario reminds me of the time I asked a fellow HR speaker why she didn’t use evaluation forms. She said: “I’m afraid they will tell me I’m bad.”

By passing up the opportunity to read evaluation forms, the speaker could not learn from her experiences. She would keep doing things the way she’d always done them, and if her approaches weren’t effective, she’d never know. As other speakers got hired over her, she’d lose business.

People analytics is not a panacea (i.e. implement it, and your talent management practices will be immediately bulletproof). As a human-run organization, you are bound to make mistakes, and bound even to fail totally in some cases. But people analytics will help you identify problems and address them sooner, before they put your business in major hot water. People analytics offer rare opportunities to strengthen your organization, to make it a better place to work and a better place from which to buy products and services.

For the rest of our answer, check out the SilkRoad blog.

 

The Evolution of Human Professions

Until recently, professional service consisted of human providers having real-time, face to face interactions with customers that were rewarded according to the amount of time spent. In this traditional model, advice or products are highly customized, focusing on the needs of individuals.

But in the near future, disruptive new models for the production and distribution of expertise are emerging thanks to advances in digital technology. According to the book The Future of the Professions by Richard and Daniel Susskind, these models include the networked experts model, the paraprofessional model, the knowledge engineering model, the communities of experience model, the embedded knowledge model, and the machine-generated model. Let’s examine each in a bit of detail.

The Networked Experts Model

Like the traditional model, this model involves human service providers, but unlike the traditional model, where experts work alone or in relatively stable organizations and groups, when experts are networked they convene as virtual teams. Groups of specialists, often online freelancers, use online platforms to interact and communicate with each other, forming transitory affiliations to solve specific problems. Professionals might not know one another, and service is more likely to be ad hoc than in the traditional model. Online project management systems are an example.

The Paraprofessional Model

In this model, service is provided via consultation from one human being to another. However, the provider is a person with more rudimentary training in a discipline. The paraprofessional cannot provide the full professional service unaided, but rather is equipped with procedures, systems, and support tools that have been previously created by experts. Ownership of the intellectual property that results from collaboration between experts who provide the guidance and paraprofessionals who deliver it is shared by both. A junior teacher who supports her curriculum with world-class online lectures is an example of this model in action.

For the rest of the models, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Why Finance Pros Are Turning to Automation

Are financial experts afraid of automation? Not exactly. If you talk to many of them, you’ll hear that technology has actually changed their jobs for the better and has positively impacted how they work in their organization by eliminating manual processes, increasing accuracy and efficiency, and facilitating valuable customer interactions.

I rounded up some of the best thoughts on automation from big timers in the industry. Here’s what they had to say.

“Automation will change how we insure property, loan money, invest money, deliver technology, write research reports, and what professionals in financial services do every day. Every week in the news we read about a new application for artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, or robots — whether it is self-driving cars, AI assistants, predictive models, robots building (or printing) hardware, or how to invest our money. Put these all in the category of automation — and that is what will impact finance the most in the next decade.” David Reilly, CTO of Bank of America, as told to Tina Wadhwa, Business Insider.

“Open digital technologies will continue to support finance transformation. Transformation is accelerating in terms of companies and people needing investment decisions, as well as the development and implementation of new business models. This will require increased automation and simplification to drive process efficiencies, increased analytics to provide high-speed business insight to drive better business decision-making, and, finally, better collaboration so business connects in a much more seamless way.”  Richard McLean, regional CFO, Asia-Pacific and Japan, SAP, as shared on the SAP blog.

“We developed a chatbot named Eno, an automated program that can communicate with the bank’s customers via text message to give them information on their accounts and help them make credit card payments from their smartphone. The gender-neutral virtual assistant uses artificial intelligence to respond to natural language text messages from users about their money. For example, customers might ask Eno to show them their recent account balances or pay off a credit card bill.” Ken Dodelin, vice president of digital product development, Capital One, as told to Anne Irrera, Reuters.

For more insights from finance professionals, check out the full post on the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

IDEO's New Ideas for Building Innovation

Global design firm IDEO is known for its innovation. In fact, many clients approach the firm specifically because they want to learn its secrets. In a research initiative meant to get at the heart at what makes innovative companies tick, IDEO studied its 26-year archive of projects that focused on clients’ internal team dynamics, as well as external sources focused on innovation (including Fast Company‘s annual Most Innovative Companies lists).

One major theme emerging from the research? Many business leaders, including those in IT, hold back permission to innovate. Scared off by potential security breaches through the cloud and employees going rogue with unauthorized software solutions, IT often serves as a bottleneck in the implementation of cutting edge technology. But, as the data clearly showed, the workers closest to the organization’s most pressing business challenges are the ones who play the most critical roles in leveraging innovation to solve them.

At FastCoDesign, Katharine Schwab reported the main recommendations gleaned from IDEO’s data. Let’s highlight those, along with some ideas for encouraging IT to greenlight your initiatives.

Keep lots of options open

The IDEO research indicated that when teams iterate on five or more different solutions, they are 50 percent more likely to launch successfully. This is contrary to the traditional viewpoint that you should pilot and invest heavily in only one idea at a time. Staying flexible as to where the project might go also allows you to iterate alongside IT and accept that team’s suggestions for how to best move forward.

Challenge existing processes

IDEO found that when the majority of team members said that they felt comfortable challenging the status quo and acting with autonomy, the chances of a failed launch decreased by nearly 17 percent. Talk to your IT group about how you can experiment in a safe way that doesn’t result in any unnecessary risks to the organization or its technology infrastructure. Share best practices and seek IT’s partnership in the realm of process improvement.

For the rest of the findings, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.