Chapter
7

Using the Real-Time People
Lever to Transform to a More
Real-Time Organization

All organizations understand that competitive pressures increase over time and they must evolve to survive. When an organization undertakes a transformational program that is intended to make the company more real time by using the people lever, the company must either further develop the existing staff, customers, or relevant others, or it must acquire personnel to fulfill identified resource deficits. It is essential that the adapted or additional resources have the appropriate motivation and correspondingly appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to permit the company to move in a new direction. An example of desirable motivation for such resources includes the employees’ drive to participate in the company’s overarching efforts to value customer time as a precious customer resource. An example of an appropriate KSA is the ability to understand and communicate the business value associated with the company’s efforts to improve efficient use of customer time.

It is imperative that employees understand that customer expectations will continue to rise as they place an increased emphasis on their time value and more companies join the real-time revolution. Companies must continually improve performance over time. Employees must accept that what is great responsiveness today will slip to become adequate tomorrow and, ultimately, become unacceptable as competitors improve their responsiveness and customer expectations rise.

For those who are responsible for monitoring and responding to real-time customer experiences, KSAs that are associated with capturing RTMR data may be appropriate. For personnel analyzing RTMR data, appropriate KSAs include the appreciation for how the quality of the experience impacts the value of time. These innovators should have KSAs that reflect an appreciation of the overriding value of time across all of a customer’s interactions with the company and its products and services. Properly motivated, these analysts would be tasked with ensuring that an innovative improvement to one aspect of the organization and, ultimately, the customer experience does not cause degradation to another.

It is essential for all employees of a real-time company to understand the role they play in not only serving customers but also going beyond and helping customers make better use of their time. As a nonreplicable resource, time will become increasingly precious as customers continually strive to achieve more in a targeted time span. Customers will increase their appreciation of companies that help them realize their time-driven objectives.

When a company seeks to become more centered on meeting customers’ time-driven objectives, it should recognize that its culture will change. The real-time transformation will most likely result in changes in the behavior and attitudes of people, including those within the company and those outside that interact with it. The transformation could be based on training employees to provide faster and more accurate customer service. More generally it could be based on employees developing new knowledge and skills. It could be based on acquiring and using new information and communications technologies or making better use of existing tools, thereby changing how people work and communicate. It could be based on internal process changes that require employees to be trained to perform the new processes appropriately. In other cases it could be based on product changes that impact customers, employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders, requiring training and support to assist them with the changes. All of these changes involve the use of the people lever.

When a company decides to undergo a transformation to provide better real-time customer experiences, it should think carefully about the people affected, the changes in people that are needed, and what will make those changes possible. Some of the people will be those responsible for leading and implementing the change. Others will be those living with the change; they will be participating in the experiences that occur after the transformation. Some people may be part of both groups.

The people lever can be the primary means of transforming the organization to value customer time more effectively than the competition. However, when another lever, such as the product lever, is the primary mechanism to transform the company, a transformation program with human capital as a supporting lever will also probably be needed. It is clear that corporate leaders must play an active role to encourage the company’s employees to participate in such a transformational program. What is often overlooked, though, is that these leaders may also need to enlist the support of external stakeholders, including suppliers and possibly even the customers, for such a transformation to reach its full potential. The leadership team, working together, must help all those touched by the changes understand the goal, why it is important, and how their roles in the transformation create a benefit for everyone. When an organization joins the real-time revolution, the messaging emanating from the leaders must reflect the importance the organization places on the value of customer time. A more subtle but important consideration is the fact that the messaging should also reflect management’s desire to demonstrate a higher appreciation for customer time than the competition.

Transformations with the people lever run the risk of failure if the proper support is missing. For example, assume your company enhances its product with new features that allow it to better support the product in the field. The customer’s perceived value of these features is not in the features themselves but in the more efficient support services that stand behind the product. This perceived value only becomes tangible if the support services personnel are trained to use these new features so customer services are improved. Should these additional features slow the support process due to increased complexity or lack of appropriate training, the effort to improve the product will have negative repercussions.

Similarly, consider the situation where a company enhances a product’s features to make customer use more efficient. It then relies upon alternative training materials and methods such as online FAQs (frequently asked questions), digital manuals, or videos to enable customers to learn how to make direct use of these features. These support materials are well intentioned; however, if the content is difficult to find or use, the efficiency improvements provided by the new features are effectively offset by the time needed to find and digest the digital training materials.

As one further example, consider the company that creates an option for customers to share their experiences with a product so other customers can benefit from a larger community of knowledge. Such a well-meaning program is often unappreciated, unless the company provides a participation incentive and curates submittals so they are evaluated for validity and presented in an organized fashion. What could be a great program could end up undermining the larger goal of respecting customer use of time. The company needs to consider the total time and quality of experiences the customer has when dealing with the company and its products and services.

The story of Steris is an example of a company that focused on changing its personnel via training to instill a goal of being more customer service oriented.

Executives may adopt a different approach to developing among employees the overarching goal of valuing customer time better than competitors do. For example, they can intentionally focus on helping employees understand this goal, why it is important, and how they can achieve it as part of their communications via an internal social network.

The story of Degordian is an example of a company that focused on changing its personnel via hiring to provide clients with better quality experiences that meet their time expectations while also satisfying its leaders’ goal of growth.

Degordian sought to achieve two goals at the same time. Achieving one of those goals—better quality projects that met customer time expectations—helped Degordian become a more real-time organization. Use of the people lever to hire additional expert staff made it possible for Degordian to achieve better quality results. Hiring additional people also made it possible to achieve its other goal of growth. The need for leaders to communicate with organizational members is apparent in the CEO’s recognition that extensive changes require more time to inform and educate. Executives should expect to communicate when leading real-time transformations, particularly where the people lever is concerned.

Executive Use of Internal Social Networks—A USC Marshall Research Project

Many companies have undertaken corporate use of internal social networks to support communications by executives, with mixed results. These efforts often include sharing updates and announcements with employees, responding to their questions and concerns, listening to their ideas, and holding conversations with them.⁵⁸

In some cases, these posts can have a very positive impact, as they provide employees with insights into what the executives value individually and as a group. However, if the posts are simply a retransmission of official news and happenings, employees often leap to the conclusion that the rhetoric about sharing and collaboration is nothing more than a “oneway street.” If the engagements are focused to a limited number of participants, the employees will not consider the exchanges as reflective of the larger corporate culture. Moreover, if the engagements are not genuine, the effort can actually damage the employee-management trust relationship that is required to maintain a cohesive corporate identity. Executive communication can be a key contributor to shared goals and a positive corporate culture but only when that communication is able to engage the employee as an active partner in a shared endeavor.

A positive corporate culture is created in an environment where the employees feel authenticity, attachment, pride, and fun.⁵⁹

  Authenticity occurs when the words of leaders are aligned with the leaders’ personal actions; the leaders are seen to be walking the talk, even when the “talk” refers to interactions on a collaboration site.

  Attachment is a feeling among employees that they belong to a community of shared values and interests, a community focused on common objectives. The most successful companies are those that are able to activate an entire organization around a common mission.

  Pride is a belief that the company values are recognized externally by the public and that internally the employees are recognized for their contribution to that achievement; employees who feel their contribution to the larger mission is unappreciated rapidly disconnect.

  Fun is not the same as entertaining; fun is the feeling of playfulness that employees feel when experimenting with new ideas at work.

The content of executive communication must reinforce these four elements of a positive corporate culture. A culture that has a high rating on the four elements of authenticity, attachment, pride, and fun is described as having a high emotional capital rating. Companies with higher emotional capital ratings are positively associated with greater profitability, greater revenue growth, and an increased ability to innovate. In contrast, companies with low emotional capital ratings are associated with poor use of technology and an inability to respond to market changes. Leaders in the high-performing corporations are three to four times more likely to frequently make use of corporate collaboration platforms in an effort to extend their influence more broadly across their organizations.

Collaboration platform suppliers often stress the importance of executive participation in collaborative networking programs; however, the nature of that participation is frequently ambiguous. Organizational leaders may want to ask, “How do we succeed in establishing a culture that will support transforming our organization to value customer time?” As a team, executives should undergo training, coaching, and planning to communicate more effectively on internal social networks. Collaboration is a team effort, and the employees will quickly decipher whether their leaders who choose to participate are doing so as an individual or part of a larger cohesive team. More specifically, the team must be trained to focus their communication strategies to accomplish the following:

  Promote authenticity in relationships among employees

  Give employees a sense of pride

  Help employees feel attachment to the communities of shared values and interests

  Inject a sense of fun (in a purposeful way) into the workplace

  Help employees understand the overarching goal of valuing customer time better than the competition

Accomplishing those goals will increase a leadership team’s ability to transform the organization to a real-time organization. More specifically, that should encourage people to respond positively to use of the people lever.

Among the most successful companies in this area, executives work as a team and coach one another on their communication efforts. When executives coordinate their communication efforts and allow those relationships to be visible, it serves to inspire all of the employees to work together as a group. Working together, executive teams can discuss overarching goals and communication strategies. They can also coordinate the conversations, messaging, and approaches they take to communicate on internal social networks. In addition, these executives often institute a process that makes use of metrics to measure positive progress and to detect negative reactions that may warrant adjustments.

Example of Joint Use of Core Levers with the People Lever

Core transformational levers may be employed in conjunction with the people lever. Consider an example where, under a new process, a company’s customers are able to enter order details directly to the factory floor and check on production status themselves rather than going through a salesperson. Besides freeing salespersons from having to support numerous customer inquiries, which slows their ability to support other customers, it also allows customers direct access to their order information on demand. Such a transformation program can be designed to include a process that analyzes customer-driven change orders in an effort to dynamically identify emerging trends that can systemically alter subcontractor order quantities.

In this example, the process lever is the driving lever that changes the procedure for entering orders and checking production status. That includes use of an important supporting tool within the process lever— information and communications technology—that unlocks the organization’s ability to demonstrate that it values customer time. Another lever needed to support these changed processes is the data lever. Properly designed, the data lever collects and drives data and inquiries to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, to the trend/market analytics system, to the RTMR system, to management dashboards, and to customer relationship management systems. This example also uses the people lever as a support function to ensure that everyone involved— including customers, salespeople, information systems personnel, and data analysts—all understand the steps in the new processes and how they increase the company’s ability to improve interactions with their customers. Furthermore, if the transformational program requires the onboarding of new information and communication technology, the involved personnel need to be trained on the technology before the new processes can be developed or put in place.

Providing Useful Tools for Geographically Distributed Teams—A USC Marshall Research Project

An important aspect of a real-time company is that it is able to respond quickly to customer requests for new products or services. Product development programs can be lengthy, and customers generally accept that delivery of a quality product with immediate turnaround is unreasonable. The need to be real time in a product development setting means that the company is able to respond as fast as or faster than the competition with a similar product at a similar level of quality. A company’s ability to respond quickly to such requests is often dependent on its ability to quickly assemble the necessary experts and technology required to satisfy the demand.

In many instances, teams of people must work together to complete each step in the life of a product or service, e.g., designing, producing, or maintaining it. These teams link with each other in complex and evolving ways as the product or service evolves throughout its life. The staff associated with these teams often resides at different geographic locations. Collectively, the personnel involved in such efforts typically include a mix of employees within a company’s different locations and affiliated staff employed by partnered companies that are also located at different locations. It is usually logistically unreasonable to bring all the involved parties together in one place, so the organization logically organizes the teams as a series of geographically distributed (or virtual) teams. These distributed teams have the advantage of being created from personnel with valuable and needed skills, even when working in different locations. But this approach also has the disadvantage of geographic separation, which complicates the interaction between team members.

Historically, a geographically distributed team would make heavy use of travel to periodic remote physical meetings to communicate more clearly and maintain team cohesion. Today’s information and communication technologies allow members of geographically distributed teams to communicate and function remotely from one another, reducing (though not eliminating) the need for unproductive and costly travel.

Geographically distributed teams often have problems that are rooted in coordination and communication issues. USC Marshall researched these problems in an engineering context to discover that in many cases the communication regimens are often held constant throughout a project’s life even though some communication processes work better during design phases and others work better during review phases. A product’s life can be divided into a series of design (also known as creation) and corresponding review tasks. For example, these tasks could include the design (or creation) and review of requirements definition, conceptual design, detailed design, development, production, and support. During each review, the design team is responsible for providing an accurate, concise overview of that design task to date so the design can be evaluated and coordinated with other parallel design tasks. Reviewers are responsible for assessing the design to ensure that the current state will properly feed future tasks, allowing the product to be produced, tested, installed, operated, and maintained on schedule and in a manner that is acceptable to customers.⁶⁰ The design and review tasks differ and have disparate coordination and communication needs.⁶¹

The most successful companies accept that design and review processes are fundamentally different and structure their coordination and communication processes around the specific tasks they are intended to support. When geographically distributed teams are reviewing an engineering artifact (the output from a design task), current methods of electronic coordination and communication, such as email, phone, speakerphone, and videoconference, appear to be adequate. In these environments, individual teams are allowed the freedom to select a review methodology that is most comfortable for the individual team members. However, these same methods of electronic coordination and communication are not adequate to support the geographically distributed design of those same artifacts.

Companies possess a variety of tools that can be employed to improve the ability of their people to respond to customer requests for new products or services. Since research has identified different tools as better for different situations, a company selecting a project management tool set should, ideally, select those that are a best fit for the task at hand. However, the most difficult challenge for the company is not the tool selection process but facilitating the adoption of the tools by the people performing those tasks. Given that each design and review task is different, leaders will be faced with deciding whether to adopt an optimal tool set for each phase despite the incremental adoption costs or whether a suboptimal tool set that avoids unnecessary adoption costs is superior.

Successful companies find many shortfalls with traditional communication methodologies during the design tasks. Many companies simply accept that the use of traditional tools with geographically distributed teams will lower efficiency and slow progress. Because of these shortfalls, many companies use face-to-face meetings to supplement videoconference meetings. Though this may be considered a possible best practice, it is difficult to strike the correct balance between the two options. Face-to-face meetings put a large travel burden on the team, whereas videoconferencing often reduces the effectiveness required between team members when facing complex problems.

Many existing project management tools are targeted for use by well-defined and localized new product development programs. As projects become more complex and involve a larger number of external partners and more geographically distributed teams, new tools are needed to support communication and coordination. Many available tools are not able to deal with complicated ideas that span organizational and geographical boundaries. Specifically, many are not able to perform consensus building and consensus checking.

It is not hard to find examples of development teams that are spread around the world. In these situations, there is no common time zone that allows a review meeting during business hours. Ideally, design and review tasks can be conducted without the inconvenience and expense of asking talented personnel to travel or work late at night or early in the morning. Until the next generation of tools begins to emerge, real-time companies will continue to jockey in an effort to use the existing technology so people can communicate as responsively as possible.

Key Takeaways

  The people lever is one of the core levers for transforming customer real-time experiences. Organizational leaders who decide to use the people lever see a need for employees, customers, suppliers, or relevant others to change. They may also see a need to hire people or work with people beyond current participants to bring about change.

  For people to value customer time better, they must have the motivation and skills to do so. To align people’s motivations with valuing customer time, leaders can focus on helping the people involved in a transformation understand what it means to value customer time, why it is important, and how they can help achieve the objective. Training and education programs for employees as well as other important players, including customers and suppliers, are an important component for successful use of the people lever.

  Organizational leaders should recognize that they play a significant role in establishing a positive corporate culture. A question they should ask themselves is, “How do we succeed in establishing a culture that will encourage people to respond positively to use of the people lever?” The answer is found in better communication. As with other employees, leaders will benefit from targeted training and education directed, in this case, at helping them learn to communicate better using contemporary tools.

  Successful use of the people lever includes providing people with tools that provide better support for their actions and interactions. For example, various tools support real-time communication and coordination. However, the need to develop better real-time tools is apparent when people interact to address complex issues with more external partners and geographically distributed teams.

  Organizations that have joined the real-time revolution use the people lever by itself and in conjunction with other core levers to make transformations that value customer time better than competitors. Even when one of the other levers is employed to drive a transformational project, the people lever is likely to be an important complementary lever.