An organization is a network of relationships.
Everyone is talking about how Customer Intelligence can yield higher growth rates - finding the right entry points to help find the best leads that are ready for your solution, helping you win more opportunities that meet your buyer profile or helping you continually grow your relationship reach is a constant heartbeat for customer relationship management (CRM) innovators.
Market leaders like: IntroHive, Salesforce, GainSight to name a few are rallying around the Customer Intelligence market positioning. IntroHive has the most compelling - unified end to end vision as it understands that a successful organization and growing a business is a team sport. Deep collaboration with insights along the customer journey is paramount. It is only when you achieve true revenue acceleration when sales, operations, marketing, IT, administration, and customer success teams are all aligned and working towards a shared goal that you can reach higher performance levels and create a network of internal entrepreneurs.
You may be wondering what does customer intelligence have to do with organizational design thinking. From my perspective, it’s everything.
All the intelligence that comes from faster and smarter algorithms surfacing up customer insights will not be utilized effectively if the people performance or “happiness intelligence” is not aligned with customer intelligence operating practices.
A constant balancing act is needed. Let me explain more.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Labor issued data confirming that the job market continues to be characterized by ample job opportunities and high levels of voluntary resignations, revealing that even after two years since the pandemic first began, millions of workers continue to leave their jobs each month. With extreme labor shortages, the rising cost of living and the desire for increased job satisfaction, board directors and CEOs need to focus more on Employee Happiness.
Gallup recently released the State of the Global Workplace: 2022 report, which found that workers are experiencing staggering rates of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with employee engagement practices. Sixty percent of people reported being emotionally detached at work and 19% as being miserable. Only 33% reported feeling engaged and this statistic is even lower than 2020.
In the U.S. specifically, 50% of workers reported feeling stressed at their jobs on a daily basis, 41% as being worried, 22% as sad, and 18% are angry.
Our own research at SalesChoice, has also found that clients are increasingly starting their days feeling overwhelmed, less in control, and are openly sharing their feelings about not being in their best mental state. Dr. Marc Brackett, the leading Director and researcher from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, in his book on Permission to Feel, offers rich insights that emotions are information that: guide our attention spans, creates the social context to how we learn, impacts our decision making, influences our health, and also impacts our creativity, effectiveness and our performance.
In other words, our emotional state and how we show up for life (work, family, play, etc) is our eye to our world.
So if 40% of the US population is sad or angry on any given day, a leadership imperative is needed to improve our employee health and wellness/emotional well being.
One lesson that I learned years ago was that structure drives function. So taking stock of your entire organizational structure is a very useful exercise in getting real.
To achieve a high performing customer intelligence organization, it is imperative to understand how healthy your people are within your organizational structure, and most importantly do they have a positive energy force to propel them forward in order to perform as a high performing and entrepreneurial networked team.
What is a high performing team?
High-performance teams is a concept within organization development referring to teams, organizations, or virtual groups that are highly focused on their goals and that achieve superior business results. My last 3 blogs focused on outlining research from Dean Meyer’s latest book on How Organizations Should Work, and provided additional context. See links below for more insights.
Maximizing Growth in Organizations (Blog One)
Entrepreneurial Behaviours for How Organizations Should Work (Blog Two)
How Organizations Should Work (Blog Three)
Why is this important?
It is easy to become enamoured with technology innovations and the excitement that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring to an organization that is complex and rich with customer data.
But how your people show up for work is what’s key to productivity and ensuring customer health experiences are positive and memorable. Companies like Purolator take considerable care in valuing employee health and happiness. Software innovators also like Achievers genuinely care about human performance and getting everyone to higher achievement levels.
The Gallup research found that the leading cause of job dissatisfaction is characterized as “unfair treatment at work. ” Working in a culture that does not emphasize respect, community, and contribution acknowledgement is a recipe for stagnant growth and creates a toxic culture. The Gallup’s report states examples from mistreatment by co-workers, inconsistent compensation, and corporate policies, to biases and favouritism are some of the top reasons cited.
“The role of the manager is really important in wellbeing,” Jim Harter, chief scientist of workplace management and wellbeing at Gallup. Their first job is to make sure the work-related things are right — people know what their role is, they get recognized when they do good work, they feel cared about at work and have a chance to develop in the future, they can see where they’re headed in the organization. If you can get those sorts of things right, you start building trust. And when you have trust, you can open the door for having broader discussions around wellbeing.”
How to build Customer Intelligence Velocity
Starting each day with an employee health pulse on how employees are feeling and appreciating their reasons for feeling the way they are feeling, and taking seriously their comments is increasingly becoming a leadership lightening rod to giving employees a secure and private way to express how they feel.
It pays to have thriving workers — Gallup found that business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with business units with miserable workers. Employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the world $7.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 11% of global GDP.
Why you should ensure Happiness First is a corporate foundation for enabling customer intelligence?
- People who are happy with their jobs are less likely to leave their jobs, less likely to be absent, and less likely to engage in counterproductive behaviours at work.
- People who are happy with their jobs are more likely to engage in behavior that contributes to a happy and productive organization, more likely to be physically healthy, and more likely to be mentally healthy.
- Happiness and job performance are related—and the relationship likely works in both directions (e.g., happy people do a better job and people who do a good job are more likely to be happy).
- Unit- or team-level happiness is also linked to positive outcomes, including higher customer satisfaction, profit, productivity, employee turnover, and a safer work environment.
In general, a happier organization is a more productive and successful organization.
Did you know that about 70 percent of people say they define their purpose through work. And, actually, millennials, even more so, are likely to see their work as their life calling.
A recent article in the Harvard Business Review, “Financial Targets Don’t Motivate Employees,” lays out a compelling argument:
- financial results may be the outcome that management seeks, but they are not a root driver for employee performance;
- by contrast, employee engagement is the lifeblood of successful organizations; and
- there is no path to “spreadsheet your way to passion.” Organizations will either genuinely harness the full potential of their employees because they give those employees purpose to be “excited and care about their work,” or they will not.
Conclusion
First, few people work extra hours, voluntarily spend sleepless nights, or dream up inventions for a company when told that they are “a cog in a machine whose primary purpose is to hit… financial targets” for shareholders they do not know.
Gallup organization, confirm that “[e]mployee engagement is a consistent predictor of many organizational outcomes—including customer loyalty, profitability and sales.” Data collected over the last year of pandemic and economic dislocation reveal that employee engagement is, in fact, “an even stronger predictor of organizational performance during recessions than in non-recession times.”
And according to Gallup, “engaged employees are 36 times more likely to take the kind of risks that can lead to breakthroughs,” companies need to engage them with compelling and unifying purpose.
From my perspective, leading customer intelligence firms will ensure that employee intelligence is connected strategically, using relationship strength and social ties as visualization knowledge graphs (like Quantexa, IntroHive), and daily employee engagement and emotional health and wellness insights will offer integrated insights to the strength of the customer value realization being achieved.
We are living in a period where we need to reflect on more humanistic fundamentals balanced with data collection fundamentals and ensure that any new systems or operating practices genuinely leads to more engaged and happier employees.
Board director and CEOs should step back and reflect on these questions:
1.) What is your employee happiness score vs your customer happiness score?
2.) What percentage of your investments are supporting customer enabling practices vs employee enabling practices?
3.) How strong is your management development and employee coaching program(s) given managers account for 70% of the variances in team engagement scores (Gallup)?
4.) How are you bringing together customer intelligence and employee (happiness) intelligence systems and practices into a unified AI Platform that every employee and customer moment of truth is easily harnessed, at the same time protecting privacy and security?
There is so much opportunity to unleash increased employee engagement and well-being practices that its’ time for board directors and CEO’s to dig deeper into their company’s business strategy and operating model. Plus reading Dean Meyer’s new book, on How Organizations Should Work is a great place to get started.
You can also read a prior blog that I wrote on The New AI Supply Chain: Happiness Economics.
In summary, customer intelligence growth is only fully realized when happiness intelligence is optimized and valued.
Note:
If you want to learn more about how you can bring you both customer intelligence and employee intelligence together in a unified experience, go here and happy to have a discovery call. Change is never easy. but it always starts with a healthy dose of curiosity and courage - two key ingredients for innovation capacity.
