12 Signs of a People-first Company Culture
A People-first Company Culture
I believe a people-first, profit will follow culture can lead to explosive growth.
I am an outgoing introvert and not a particularly touchy-feely person. I really, really dislike most team building events, though I have been on some incredible teams where we were TIGHT. These activities are energizing for many but feel shallow and superficial to me when I try to rally and join in. There are times I could use a dose of warmth and nurturing for others versus my business-efficient approach that includes directness and candor aka tough love.
Why do I tell you all that?
A people-first culture is not defined as one that prioritizes singing folks songs and skipping through parks. It’s about prioritizing people by empowering, equipping, and enabling them to do their best work.
12 Signs of a people-first culture?
Empower teams with effective policies and procedures and supportive leadership, making sure logic isn’t benched
Equip employees with technology (automation and information); ix-nay silo’d data
-Automation so they are not burdened with repetitive, time-consuming tasks that often suck energy and motivation
-Information so they can serve customers with accurate information in a timely manner
Enable teams with quality processes that encompass efficient workflows and approvals and provide visibility into status
Educate with ongoing training and development opportunities
Empathize with each other and customers, at every level of your org
Elevate diversity by engaging different voices and promoting different mindsets and approaches at all levels of your org
Encourage cross-functional teamwork (and creativity); eradicate the silo-mindset
Evaluate outcomes and progress towards company, team, and individual goals
Express appreciation to each other and acknowledge successes
Explain to each team member who their customer is as well as their customers’ wants, needs, and priorities (internal or external customers)
-Articulate clearly their ability to impact their customers’ wants, needs, and priorities
-Help each team member to understand who their customers’ customer is and their wants, needs, and priorities; everyone should have line of sight to external customers and their ability to make an impact
Exemplify company values consistently and hold each other accountable for doing so
Exercise critical thinking, root cause identification in problem solving, and reflecting on lessons learned.
-Lessons learned: what worked, what are we learning, how can we improve?
What else? What have I missed?
Scaling Up - The SMB Struggle is Real!
I believe a people-first, profit will follow culture can lead to explosive growth, but culture does not naturally scale, and great employee and customer experiences don’t organically stay-in-tact as you grow. Culture and experiences easily erode without focus, intention, and prioritization.
The majority of companies I work with say customers are at the heart of everything they do. They say customer focus is on their DNA; it is just who they are. When we take a closer look, we often notice that while that may have been true when they started out, actions, systems and processes are no longer aligned with that value of customer focus. The companies have outgrown their customer focus without noticing.
As your company grows, a negative side effect of growth is often that internal growing pains are felt externally by customers. Your company becomes more and more difficult to work with, and you do not notice the extent of the problem or what is causing it until the problem is painfully eroding profit margins and increasing customer churn.
As a company grows, the lack of value alignment progressively dilutes customer focus as decisions are made, which are unintentionally misaligned with those values, until those values are merely aspirational words, not woven into the fabric of culture, decision-making, corporate priorities, and compensation.
Company values-in-action gradually erode and ultimately the experience being provided erodes too. There is a growing gap between what the customer expects, the reality of the experience being delivered and what you believe (assume) the customers’ experience is today as compared to what it once may have been.
How does this happen when customer focus is a core company value?
Growth puts strains on the system (people, process, technology), and oftentimes existing customers are not being well-served. As you grow, your business becomes more complex. Gradually. More technology, more processes, more people, which often means more silos, policies and procedures, disconnected systems, sources of master data and ultimately less experience consistency for customers. The experience you deliver to your customers ends up as a franken-xperience. It is a hodgepodge, cobbled-together experience that has evolved over time. Hand-offs between teams are ad hoc; processes have become too varied or too rigid; manual errors are multiplied. When you get a customer complaint or escalation, your team does its best to fix it, to make it right for your customer. The desire to have a customer focus is still on your DNA, but you do not fix the root of the problems—the real cause.
It does not have to be that way, if you have a game plan in place.
Customer focus requires alignment, but company growth often erodes it. Processes, employee behaviors, and technology must be aligned around customer expectations to consistently deliver what customers value. It is critical you operationally and sustainably integrate and embed customer focus into everything you do in order to maintain alignment with your company values.
1. Understand customer expectations and desired experience and design them into your processes and technology.
2. Align employee behavior with your processes and technology to create a consistently positive customer experience.
3. Recognize internal culture, employee engagement, and brand promise are linked through the experiences your employees deliver.
4. Enable employees to provide a delightful customer experience with technology designed around customer expectations.
It is possible to grow capacity intelligently, proactively serve your people (employees, customers, partners) with great experiences, and build deeper connections without outspending your profits. We do it by helping midsize companies operational-ize a people-first culture that grows happier customers with Magnetic Experiences. We believe easy, consistent, personalized, and brand-aligned experiences keep customers coming back and spending more.
Have you purchased your copy of my new book? It’s a short guidebook, and in it I share five key customer experience mistakes organizations make that lead to profit erosion. I wrote the book because these mistakes often go unnoticed—they start as small inefficiencies and multiply throughout the organization as the company's growth accelerates. When you know what mistakes you're making, you can start working to patch the holes and create a stronger customer experience.
Available on Amazon ➡️ https://bit.ly/CXbook
* Denotes excerpts from my book The Five Customer Experience Mistakes you don’t know you are making That Are Causing Profit Erosion
