To truly gain the full business benefit of Visual Management, it requires leaders to manage at the speed of sight and thought. More than ever, Visual Management is critically important to a leader’s success because 83% of what we learn is visual. The best way we can do this is to get close to the workplace, close to where the variances and problems are, which will drive the business case for Visual Management.

There have been at least 12 major research studies on engagement over the last few years that prove there is undeniable evidence that employee engagement correlates with sustainable top and bottom line business results. Here are just a few external research examples: Hewitt Associates looked at 1700 companies and their 5-year average return to shareholders.  Hewitt’s conclusion: higher employee engagement correlates with higher shareholder return.  Towers Perrin’s (now Tower’s Watson) consulting group looked at employee engagement of 86,000 people in 16 different countries.  They concluded higher engagement correlated to employees’ who believed they could positively impact process and make a difference in a business’ quality, customer service, and production costs.  CSI International has conducted research on the impact of employee engagement and process improvement in global Fortune 500 manufacturing companies and has correlated increased levels of employee engagement with improved productivity, velocity, attendance, safety and quality.

Visual Management and employee engagement are different sides of the same coin. Visual Management tools make employee involvement and engagement a hard and fast, black and white, measureable, visual reality. These tools give employees the information to make real-time decisions on how to impact the business and process. As long as we are optimizing any resource or part of the process, costs invariably go up. It is only when we SEE and manage the workflow in its entirety that productivity goes up and costs go down.

Sharing information is a three-step process.

Step one is sharing the information. First you have to decide what you want to share and how you are going to share the information.

Step two is to generate understanding. That’s not sending people to an FAQ. It’s dialogue. It includes asking and answering questions. If you don’t know the answer to something you might have to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out and get back to you.”

Step three is reinforcing the learning or best practices. It is important for you to reinforce a key message, communicate strategy, desired process changes or best practices. By reinforcing information, learning and best practices will make the message be heard and acted on.

We want senior leaders to hear and act on the truth. That means every leader in our organization should be recognizing employees.  Every leader should be reinforcing those who proactively bring problems or suggestions to them with rewards and recognition.  And, every piece of feedback gets treated as a gift. The best leaders realize that the emotional side of engagement and continuous improvement is all about no blame and respect for people.

Perhaps you are one of many who decided to crank up recognition in the workplace because you understand the power of employee appreciation.  Have you started recognizing employees?  Do you think any of your staff see the difference in you yet?

I’m posting this to remind you that intense focus and follow up on your good intentions matter.  Take a look at my last post of 2011: Good Intentions Not Delivered Equals Squat.

Here’s to great results and a Happy New Year!

For those in a management or supervisory position, it is critical that you become coaches, facilitators and cheerleaders for the service improvement process. Those you lead and support will be looking to you for recognition, feedback and focus on their execution and application of the principles and philosophies necessary to create exceptional service experiences.

By recognizing employees and rewarding valued service behaviors and actions, leaders will create enthusiasm and momentum for continuous improvement.

While this focus, attention and feedback from management are critical, often times the best recognition in the workplace is peer-to-peer, work group to work group and yes, even employee to direct supervisor. When you create a culture where everyone is focused on serving, you will drive intense levels of customer loyalty.

I have traveled all over the world helping organizations with leadership or customer service experience issues. By observing leadership interactions you get a very accurate picture of what the customer service experiences are going to be like. Conversely, by observing the customer service experiences, you get a very accurate insight into the leadership practices and effectiveness.

What’s amazing to me is that so few organizations have figured out how to create loyal, raving fan customers. That is because most are looking for a grand slam or a silver bullet to create customer loyalty. When in fact, the best and really the only way to create customers for life is not through one heroic act or grand slam, but through the cumulative effect of all the small actions that lead to a more hassle free, seamless and exceptional service experience. This begins with great internal service form work group to work group and employee to employee so that whoever is serving the external customer is placed in a position to win and is able to have flexibility in delighting the customer.

We know service sucks out there…That’s why we are so excited to release a suite of e-learning modules on Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences.

This suite contains the following 5 modules:

• Customer Communications
• Customer Problem Solving
• Customer Connections and Commitments
• Delighting Customers
• Continuous Experience Improvement
  

The best part is this course is designed for everybody in your organization and only takes 15 – 20 minutes per week. We guarantee this process will transform your organization’s service experiences from the inside out!

Pete

About this time of year people make New Year’s resolutions and set personal and/or professional goals for themselves. Typically, companies do the same thing in the form of setting budgets, goals and performance targets for the forthcoming year. As you look back on your resolutions for 2011, how many of those did you stick to? How many of those did you follow up with? How many of those goals did you exceed? One of the most common New Year’s resolutions after the holiday season is, “I’m going to lose 10 pounds.” Typically after that resolution is made people will try 2, 3, 4 or more diets, and often times end up weighing more than when they started. How many diets does it take to lose weight?

Answer: One………..The one you stick to.

The key to achieving personal excellence is follow up. This means an intense focus and follow up on your good intentions. What I’ve found is that the best coaches, the best leaders, the best teachers, and the best parents follow up, reinforce and repeat the process. Not set more goals or look for another diet.

My resolution for 2012 is to have intense levels of follow up and reinforcement in my personal and professional life for 2 reasons:

• I had a friend early in my business career teach me an important lesson; good intentions not delivered equals squat.
• Leaders that get feedback, pick important topics to improve, discuss these with their people and follow up on a regular basis get better.

With follow up your good intentions will manifest into good results.

Happy New Year!

We define engagement as capturing the discretionary energy of the talent pool. Or, when somebody does the right thing, the right way, for the right reason, even when no one is watching.

• When someone serves a customer in such a way that it creates a memorable service experience.
• When an internal partner services a colleague and helps them do their job more efficiently.
• When someone stays 15 minutes late to help a customer with a question.
• When someone refuses to spread or partake in negative gossip.
• When someone refers the organization as a great place to work.

These are all good barometers that you have a culture that is striving and creating discretionary energy. There are a lot of buzz words out there and an ever-increasing focus on employee engagement. In today’s environment people are often times grateful for a job. Unless they feel truly involved and supported, you’re not going to tap into their discretionary energy.  And it’s that energy, not buzz words, that will create great customer experiences and increased productivity.

At the end of the day who do you believe, Madison Avenue or frontline employees? Do you believe what you read in a magazine, hear in a TV ad, or see in an online ad? Or do you believe a well-told story by somebody you know?  Companies spend zillions on communications and branding, but at the end of the day brand is nothing more than the cumulative stories the customer and stakeholders share. Your culture is nothing more than the stories employees share.

Seems to me that if companies spent less time on “branding” and more on developing competencies, sharing business strategy, and supporting and involving frontline associates, the increased levels of engagement would take care of the culture and take care of the brand. Don’t get me wrong, communications plays a vital role in maintaining brand integrity and is smart for any business. But intense focus on communications often overshadows the simple answer that lies right inside the company walls. Brand and culture are created from the inside out.

Teaching, enabling, and removing obstacles in my opinion play a more vital role than communications. I am glad that I wake up every day with a focus on these issues.

CSI demonstrates how the new automated Service Anniversary solution integrates with their powerful Recognition, Engagement, and Learning solutions at the 2011 HR Southwest Conference

Fort Worth, Texas (October 26, 2011).  CSI will unveil a new automated Service Anniversary solution at the 70^th Annual HR Southwest Conference 2011 (October 30 – November 2, 2011) in Fort Worth Texas.  “With over 1,800 HR professionals attending, this is a great conference to introduce our latest innovation to help companies improve employee engagement,” says Peter Psichogios, President of CSI International’s Performance Group.  “It’s critically important to give managers the training and tools to recognize performance on the job as well as to acknowledge important milestones for employees, like their years of service,” he added.

HR professionals attending the event will participate in educational tracks on topics like Global HR and Total Rewards. They can visit the CSI booth for interactive discussions on how to implement the ideas generated by the conference. “We’ve demonstrated our ability to partner with our clients and help them build a culture of recognition and engagement on a global basis,” says Jim Drakakis, CSI International’s VP Sales & Training Systems, “This is a great new approach to make our clients even more successful.”

Developing engagement requires more than annual surveys and more than an awards program.  It begins with leadership.  CSI’s research-based, Layered Learning experience teaches leaders what they need to do and develops their skills through regular practice of the leadership principles behind engagement.  CSI adds a systematic way to recognize employees based on research-based principles.  This new Service Anniversary solution augments the overall approach to recognition and engagement and provides thousands of award choices per level, so employees can select an award that is most meaningful to them.

About CSI International

CSI International helps organizations create and recognize results through people by providing learning, engagement, and recognition solutions. We believe that “people who produce good results feel good about themselves” and that’s worth rewarding!

Our foundations are firmly established in providing services that work together to create employee engagement.  Engagement of the global, multi-generational workforce is an outcome of learning, recognition, and the culture of a company.  CSI has the tools and the experience to be the preferred source for learning solutions, performance solutions, recognizing years of service, enhancing customer loyalty, sales incentives, motivation, corporate gifts, and appreciation.

CSI’s global headquarters is in Toronto, Ontario.  We have offices throughout North America.

For more information, visit us at www.csistars.com or call us at (855) 231-8407.