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Customer engagement is employee

engagement (and vice versa)
Posted 22 Sep 2011 | Julian Birkinshaw (/users/jbirkinshaw) |
34
Aout the author
Julian Birkinshaw - Julian
Birkinshaw is Professor of
Strategic and International
Management at London
Business School
(http://www.london.edu/progra
He is co-Founder and
Research Director of the
Management Lab (MLab).
Julian’s main area of expertise
is in the strategy and
management of large
multinational corporations, and
Image by : opensource.com on such specific issues as
corporate entrepreneurship,
innovation, subsidiary-
headquarters relationship,
Employee engagement is, as they say, a no-brainer. knowledge management,
There are stacks of literature showing that companies
» More about me
with committed employees who feel strongly about their (/users/jbirkinshaw)
organization do better financially than those with » Learn how you can
indifferent employees. In many cases, too, improvement contribute (/participate)
is actually quite easy to achieve.
Large numbers of employees work in silos, with
deep functional expertise but no line of sight to the
person ultimately buying their product. Yet it turns
(http://www.managementexchange.com/)
out that exposure to customers can be a powerful
source of insight and motivation.
This article was
originally posted on
That is what pharmaceutical giant Roche found the Management
when a team devised an experiment to put the Innovation eXchange
(MIX), an open
engagement proposition to a test. But, in the end, innovation project
it wasn't quite as simple as that. aimed at reinventing
management for the
The Roche team realized it would be easy to get 21st century.

stuck at a high level of abstraction in a study of

this type, so they focused on a simple
straightforward hypothesis: that a deeper emotional understanding of the
company's real value to patients and society would deliver extra engagement
among employees.

Now, the team believed its employees were already engaged and well-informed,
yet there was a fuzziness about the company vision. Compared with the famous
NASA janitor who, when asked what he was doing, replied, "putting a man on
the moon," Roche employees sometimes have a less clear line of sight between
their day jobs and what they are meant to achieve.

"If you ask people, 'What do we do?' you'll get the answer that we are a
commercial organization that makes life-saving medicines that have a massive
impact on people's lives," says Rob Rylance, one of the leaders of the study.
"But when you start peeling that back, is this actually resonating emotionally
with people or resonating as emotionally as it can?"

Probably not. But the thinking was: if patients and patients' experiences could
be brought into the organization (particularly for those employees who rarely had
direct contact with them), it would help everybody to not only focus their daily
priorities and actions but also give them a better sense of the company's guiding
mission.
What was the best way of doing this? Among a number of possibilities--hospital
or hospice visits, meeting doctors or scientists--the team quickly decided on the
simplest and most direct intervention of all: getting a single patient to talk face-
to-face about his or her experience of illness and treatment.

The experiment would be attractively direct. Two similar groups of around 30

employees, most of them from non-customer-facing departments, would
complete a straightforward, 17-question engagement questionnaire (consisting
of statements such as I am proud to work for Roche, I feel a strong sense of
commitment, I am willing to go beyond the requirements of the job, The Roche
vision is meaningful to me in my daily job--and so on). One of the groups would
then meet the chosen patient and watch a marketing presentation on the
implications and dynamics of his or her disease, after which both the control and
interventional groups would answer the engagement questions again.

Why is it so hard to do what we know is right?

The experiment went ahead as planned. After the patient had spent an hour
talking and answering questions about the experience of having the disease, the
group heard a presentation about the demographics and incidence of the
disease to give them some broader context. The groups took the questionnaire
again and gathered for a feedback session two months later to hear the results.

Statistically, the impact was detectable but small (bearing in mind that numbers
involved were low, and before-and-after times short). Even so, on the questions
involving pride, passionate belief in Roche's intentions and the meaningfulness
of the company vision for daily work, the group that met the patient scored
higher than the other group and higher than its own scores before the patient
meeting.

The verbal feedback was much stronger. One set of findings recognized the
power of patient stories to generate emotional reactions, put a context around
dry facts and figures and generate personal insights on where individuals and
the company can make a difference. But another set revealed disappointment
with Roche's internal communication, which was perceived to be lopsided,
privileging scientific and financial information over the patient agenda and
experience.

As far as participants and sponsors were concerned, the engagement

hypothesis was confirmed. Hearing patients tell their stories did underline the
meaning of the job, the positive role of the company and the connection
between the two. But, in a sense, that was obvious from the start. "It's
something we faced all along," a member of the design team said. "Lots of
people, including senior management, were saying, 'Guys, your hypothesis is a
no-brainer; of course it will work.'"

But--and here is the twist--that realization opened up a completely different

management issue, perhaps even more significant than engagement: if everyone
agrees it's both important and obvious, why aren't we doing it already? Why is it
so difficult to turn a really powerful insight into something that actually changes
behavior? Pushing it further, why do companies find it so hard to do things that
they know are necessary, sensible and right?

Everyday behaviour, not programs

The fact that the answers are known does not make the practical solution easier.
It is not that these things are hard in themselves--how hard is it to get a patient
in front of already committed employees? The trouble is that these things are
often "important" rather than "urgent."

Too many companies are mired in bureaucracy, which makes it difficult to

protect time for things that are perceived as non-essential. For all employees to
come in contact with customers, support from top management and drive are
essential so that such events "become more of a way of life rather than a
project," says the team. "You can't do this once every 10 years if you want to get
any benefit from it--it's got to be part of what happens to you in your working
life." But top management time is limited, and the calls on it limitless.

In short, inside most companies, 'hard' trumps 'soft' every time. Scientific and
financial data is often communicated widely inside companies--but not the
customer experience, a decidedly soft management practice. Yet "soft
management" directly tied to people and relationships is where the majority of
the money is spent. So, it is also potentially the place where the scope for
improvement is greatest. What if some time and money were set aside to take
patient-centricity seriously? For example, the company might give every
employee a day or two a year to do something from a menu of activities around
patient engagement--volunteering at a hospital or hospice or accompanying a
sales rep or doctor on a field trip. The team at Roche has been mulling over such
possibilities.

"This is a huge financial commitment; but, do you know what, you'd get the
benefit back in spades, you really would," says a team leader. And that was the
conclusion: putting every employee in the customer loop on a regular basis
could strengthen the entire culture of the company. Every time a Roche
employee met with a customer, the employee would leave more engaged in the
work of the company. "You'd have to be pretty cold-hearted not to walk back
into the office a little more proud, a little more engaged, than you were before."

Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Simon Caulkin

(http://www.simoncaulkin.com/).

Tags: (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

Business (/tags/business), culture (/tags/culture)

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