Reprinted with permission from Get It, Set It, Move It, Prove It: 60 Ways to Get Real Results In Your Organization by Mark Graham Brown • Copyright © 2004 by Productivity Press, a division of Kraus Productivity Organization, Ltd. •www.productivitypress.com

Chapter 6: Find Out What Aggravates Customers
    Organizations spend a lot of money trying to find ways to delight us. Extra miles, extra soaps, fancy packaging, no-cost options, free minutes, free months, and other things are supposed to entice us to buy and continue to buy their products and services. When we do buy, what we want is something pretty basic, and most of us are not thrilled by these little extras. What we want more than anything else is to have a product or service work like it is supposed to and not be aggravated when we are buying it or trying to enjoy it. How many aggravations do you think today’s airline passengers have to put up with to go from point A to point B? Try contacting your local motor vehicle department for anything more than a routine transaction and see how many aggravations you must endure. Try taking something back to a discount retail store and it will make you think twice about shopping there again. For that matter, try buying stuff at one of these places on a Saturday. They even make spending money a pain in the butt.

    Organizations would do better if they figured out all the little and big things they do to aggravate us and eliminate them, rather than waste time trying to “delight” us with extras when they can’t even get the basics right. Forget the espresso in the service department of the car dealership, just get my car fixed right when you promised. Forget the extra miles and certificates for free trips that always seem to come with a page of restrictions that make them unusable, just get the planes to land safely and on time. Forget the monthly visits from your friendly account reps with more samples of drugs that have two pages of side effects and don’t seem to work with half of patients; market a drug that works without side effects that are worse than the symptoms being treated.

    Ever try to buy anything on the Internet? Most sites are so complicated and have so many screens where you have to enter your email address and password that it is almost less aggravating to contact your call center and wait on hold for 20 minutes.

    How about shopping at a home-improvement superstore on Saturday? These are, of course, just one customer’s personal experiences, but whenever I’ve shopped at one of these retailers on the weekend, I always have to park my car a half a mile away; I get lost trying to find the items I came for; I try to find a store employee to help me and eventually I give up, after filling my cart with a bunch of cool stuff that I didn’t even intend to buy. Then I wait in line with a bunch of other weekend warriors; I finally see the store employee, but he is not there to help me. Instead, he wants to check my bags and receipt to make sure I didn’t steal anything. Selection and savings are important, and the superstores excel at both, but I think they could make shopping a little less aggravating.
Some leading organizations, such as FedEx, have done a lot of research on the different things they can do to aggravate a customer. They not only have a long list of these aggravations, they rank them from the most minor to the worst. If your package was on the plane with Tom Hanks in Castaway, that would probably qualify as a level ten aggravation. Leading organizations know all the ways they can make life difficult for customers and not only measure the occurrence of these things, they try to eliminate the aggravations entirely. Returning a rental car is now rarely aggravating thanks to hand-held terminals that agents use to check you in and get you a receipt. However, cashing a check at a bank is still, at best, a minor aggravation.

Chapter 17: Writing Stuff Down Does Not Make It Happen
    Big organizations love to write stuff down. They have binders filled with policies, procedures, work rules, flowcharts or process models, standards, specifications, appointments, meeting minutes, strategic plans, operational plans, mission and vision statements, team charters, project plans, PowerPoint presentations, and things-to-do lists. Somehow, it makes us feel better to write stuff down.

    I recall a training program I attended on time management where we learned to use this cumbersome notebook to write down our personal goals for the week, activities, and so forth. Most of the attendees felt that the approach was too cumbersome and time consuming, but the company was pushing use of this notebook, so most carried one around and tried to use it. I continued doing consulting work at this company for several years and watched the number of people carrying around their bulky planner notebooks diminish each month. One guy I talked to summed it up nicely: “I took the time I used to spend writing stuff down in my planner and now I just do my job instead, so that has added about an hour a day of productive time.”

    When we write things down it seems like we are doing valuable work: documenting a process, writing a policy, preparing a set of goals. These things all sound like things people at work should be doing. The problem is we spend too much time planning and writing stuff down that we’re supposed to do, and too little time doing the things we’re supposed to do.

    Writing down goals, procedures, or anything does not change anyone’s behavior unless they first read it, and have appropriate resources and consequences for accomplishing what it says we are supposed to do. One of the best business books in recent years is called Execution. The authors make some excellent points about the futility of simply writing stuff down. You need to execute – do the job – not just write down what you intend to do.

    I remember working with one of the largest aerospace companies that loved to issue new policies to try to change behavior in the organization. Whenever people were not doing what they were supposed to, corporate issued a new “Corporate Policy Directive” and sent it out to everyone. Some of the policies had been issued many times with multiple drafts, so a complicated coding system soon had to be devised to sort all the policy directives so that CPD 39-a. rev. 3 was not confused with CPD 39-a. rev. 2. Do you think that these policies controlled a lot of behavior? Do you think that most people even read them? Of course not. But it made the corporate types feel like they were doing their job.

    Remember in the 1990s, when everyone was enamored with process mapping? Using a collaborative team process, we created flowcharts for everything an organization did. We even got ISO 9000 certified based on the excellence of our documentation. The problem is that employees didn’t look at the process maps very often so they still did things the way they had always done them, and we even forgot to show them to the new kid who started last week and might have found them helpful.

Chapter 33: Activity Does Not Equal Results
    Managers always feel better when they see people who look busy and engaged in work. An office worker friend explains that she always takes a file folder or two with her and always walks fast. As a result, people think she is a hard worker even though she confesses to only working about three hours out of an eight-hour day. Many slackers have learned the right behaviors to spend time on to give the impression that they are hardworking team players. Most eventually get found out, but some have managed to slack off their entire careers by engaging in some shrewd behaviors. The point of this chapter is that moving it is about getting results, not about behavior or action. Just like people write many goals and plans that they never achieve, they also waste a lot of time on activities that do nothing to produce results.

    You see this at work, at play, and in all activities. I watch people sweating in the gym, doing exercises all wrong, lifting heavy weights, and they wonder why they never look any different. The best lesson I got in finding the right behaviors to spend time on and deciding which should be dropped from my repertoire was a recent client project. A large industrial organization hired me to help determine the core competencies of a Project Supervisor. This was one of the top jobs in the company, and Project Supervisors managed projects with budgets of more than $50 million that involved hundreds and even thousands of people.

    My project involved studying the two top performers – Frank and Billy – and contrasting them with the poor- or average-performing Project Supervisors to find the difference. They all had similar educations, similar prior experience, and strong dedication to the an organization needs procedures, rules, flowcharts, and plans. However, simply writing things down is not enough to achieve performance. We need to execute, not just write about it.

     If people spent less time writing stuff down and more time doing their jobs, all organizations could experience an improvement in productivity. Don’t get me wrong: documentation is important, and organization. When I studied the poor- and average-performing supervisors, I found that they all:

     With all this effort and behavior, these Project Supervisors were consistently way over budget on projects, missed major milestones, and had a lot of rework and defects on their projects. Billy and Frank’s projects were always major successes. They were done under budget, on time or early, and often with close to zero defects. These two guys were legendary in their ability to achieve good results, yet their behavior would lead you to think they were not hard workers. Frank explained it to me in an interview:

     “My priorities are my health, my family, and my job, in that order. I never come in before 7:30 and leave every day at 4:30. I work out at the gym until 5:45, shower, and have dinner with my wife and kids each night at 6:30. I never work weekends because that is when I spend time with my family. I don’t read e-mails, so people don’t send them to me. I don’t participate in any committees or any of the B.S. management programs they have going on here, and I tell my managers to only call me with something they shouldn’t be handling on their own, so I only get three or four phone calls a day. I also don’t bother with that stupid five-pound time management notebook everyone lugs around. I know what’s important and I get it done, rather than spend an hour a day writing down all this stuff.”

     As you might expect, lots of people resent Frank and think he is arrogant (he is), but Frank and his counterpart Billy have full lives outside of work and do not appear stressed out like the poor performers. Maybe Frank and Billy are just smarter than their peers, but I don’t think so. I think that both of these guys have learned which behaviors are important and which ones are not. The lesson here is that the hardest-working, busiest people are often the worst performers. Study the ones who are calm, relaxed, and go home at 5:00 while producing incredible results, and you will start to understand that a lot of the behavior managers see that makes them feel better is probably a waste of time.

Chapter 50: Looking for Links Between Hard and Soft Metrics
     A big utility in the Midwest has been tracking measures of employee morale, customer satisfaction, diversity, employee education, and various other “softer” measures on its corporate scorecard for years. It does look at performance on these softer metrics in a monthly one-hour meeting, but it has another meeting once a month that lasts most of the day where financial and operational results are reviewed. Further, the bonuses that executives receive are only tied to the financial measures. A $2 billion chemical company in Pennsylvania had a balanced set of measures as well. Back when I worked with it, 95 percent of the executive bonuses was for financial performance; five percent was for performance on all the other gauges. What this says is that the company had no faith in the non-financial metrics.

     This is actually fairly typical, and these two companies are among the majority that do not really believe that results on the softer measures really link to the hard measures of profits, growth and increase in share price. Consequently, they are unwilling to pay for these things. Also, you can cheat on these other measures, whereas everyone knows you can’t cheat on financial results, right? Right – just ask WorldCom and Enron.
     The problem with this approach is that almost all financial metrics are measures of the past, as are outcome metrics for government organizations. Executives often believe there is a link between employee morale, customer satisfaction, and outcomes, but they are not sure how strong the link is, and they do not trust the data as much as the financials.

     In order to convince executives that the softer measures really do matter, and that these results can lead to improvements in outcomes and finances, you need to prove it. So how do you prove this? With data. A financial services firm I worked with found that if it made enough small mistakes on customer accounts, or made a couple of big mistakes, customers would leave, never to return. In fact, it found the reverse to be true as well. By reducing errors it could increase customer loyalty and drive up profits, because long-term loyal customers are more profitable than new ones that have to be lured with expensive marketing campaigns. What this company also found was that you reach the point of diminishing returns when it comes to reducing errors. Customers would forgive them for an occasional minor mistake, and the effort required to get to zero defects would not drive enough increased customer loyalty to pay off. As a result of this data on the links between operational errors, customer loyalty, and profits, senior management paid much more attention to the data on operational quality than in the past.

     Sometimes these links between measures are discovered by accident, rather than through a planned experiment. A pharmaceutical firm found that a decrease in visit frequency by their sales reps actually improved customer satisfaction, when it expected satisfaction to decline. It had to increase the territory of sales reps so they had to visit doctors less often, and focus groups later revealed that doctors thought more favorably about the company because a sales rep was not always in their office bugging them when they had work to do.

     If you ever hope to get senior management to pay attention to your softer measures, such as: corporate culture, employee satisfaction, intellectual capital, and customer loyalty, you need to prove to them that these metrics link to things they care about. Executives in government care about outcomes and image or public opinion. Executives in business care about growth, profits, and share price. If you can prove that there are practically significant links between your softer measures and these outcomes, you can bet they will start paying attention to them, and possibly even linking pay to them like Ford, FedEx, and other forward-thinking companies.

    Mark Graham Brown has over 25 years of experience consulting with organizations on measuring and improving performance. He is the author of three books on Balanced Scorecards and Strategic Planning: Keeping Score – Using the Right Metrics to Drive World-Class Performance (1996), Winning Score – How to Design and Implement Organizational Scorecards (2000), and now Get It, Set It, Move It, Prove It (2004). Mr. Brown’s clients include Bose, Medtronic, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Army, Navy and EPA. He heads his own consulting firm in Manhattan Beach, California.
Contact information for Mark Graham Brown can be found on his website: www.markgrahambrown.com.