April 2021 - Joshuangala

Apr 20, 2021 | Updated May 03, 2023 
By @JoshuaNgala

If your manager keeps wasting your precious time, assigning you to make endless presentations on irrelevant things, and even write reports about what they had not done, then you are part of a stale toxic culture.

Corporate culture determines how a company’s employees and management interact and handle business transactions.

The willingness of staff to observe the organization’s policies and procedures begins with good leadership, which puts the value zone at the center of the organization.

That’s why successful companies invest in their teams with cohesive values that lead to greater business efficiency-driven to achieve a common goal.

However, the business world is largely focused on the what of the strategy—new products, new propositions, new markets—and pays far less attention to how a business runs its teams and employees.

Much attention is put on customers and products at the expense of employees. Such internal disparities can hinder employee productivity and morale.

To transform a company, people must therefore align themselves and work together toward one goal.

Sharing the same vision, change initiative reduces the normal tensions between areas among others, sales and logistics, marketing and finance, and human resource and finance.

So, where does transformation begin from toxic to cohesive culture? Start looking in the mirror. Focus on things you don’t like about what you see. Also, create a picture of what could be, if you were to change.

As a corporate manager, it is important to clearly understand this concept and how you can turn one of the most toxic cultural elements in your organization into a powerful source of growth and creativity. Below are the five tips to promote cohesive culture:

1. Incite everyone to think like the owner

The biggest problem with the old-age organization structure is it doesn’t support the people in the value zone-the place where value is truly created for customers.

This stifles employees not trusting managers, as they are not empowered to be decision-makers.

To cultivate a problem-solving culture, businesses invest in employees to think like entrepreneurs. When they do so, their energy and creativity are released.

Culture matters, employees matter, customers matter, and it starts at the top.

Imagine what your organization could collaboratively accomplish if every employee was self-motivated and focused all their energy on making your business successful, To achieve the transition at this level, shift focus to the value zone. If possible, turn the organization upside down.

Make management and managers, including those in enabling functions accountable to those who create value, not just the other way around.

This approach helps managers to delegate decisions and action plans, choose transparency on transactions and compensation decisions, be intentional with every conversation, and encourage employee feedback.

2. Design the right collaborative incentive schemes

Dangle a carrot in front of a horse and he’ll pull the cart faster. If an institution wants to change and sustain employee behavior, it requires an incentive plan.

An incentive is most frequently built on monetary rewards. For that reason, a company should design the best incentive scheme that fits all employees.

Rewards can be financial, non-financial, prizes, experiential or focused on public recognition, or whatever best reflects your company culture and motivates teamwork. The recognitions, bonuses, and gifts result in increased productivity.

A joint research on incentive schemes by the International Society for Performance Improvement and The Incentive Research Foundation found that “Incentivized teams increased their performance by 45 percent; incentivized individuals increased performance an average of 27 percent.”

It means successful organizations are highly innovative, and innovation requires teamwork for the development of new ideas. Such an approach makes organizations increasingly reside in the talent and creativity of their employees.

Although team incentives can lead to heightened performance, the HR department needs to make sure they’re properly implemented to avoid red flags such as talent management issues and competition among teams.

3. Keep politics on hold

Even though office politics are a fact of life everywhere, politics affect an organization when the founders, investors, and employees don’t agree on a company vision.

It divides colleagues, supervisors, and subordinates, which results in a tense and disruptive work environment. Power games of playing dirty at the expense of someone else is harmful.

For example, watching a colleague make a mistake on a project and then turning around to report them to your boss and offering to correct is toxic.

The success of your business, therefore, relies heavily on the efforts of your employees. Some employees may also feel they aren’t getting enough credit, compensation, or options for their great work especially when power games are involved.

As Alfred Rappaort said, managers, like other people, act in their self-interest.

It is possible to promote yourself and your cause without compromising your values or those of your organization. Keep and maintain employee satisfaction throughout the company.

3 Groups of employees at the workplace. photo/ file

4. Invite open conversations

Most employees would wish not to offend their bosses for fear of getting in trouble for speaking up. This culture lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations.

There are several ways managers can use to initiate tough conversations with employees.

Break down the institutional silos and boost cross-functional collaborations. This makes leadership become a conversation that enhances collaborative information sharing.

Traditional corporate communication must also give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. This approach makes these conversations less difficult so you and your team can come to effective solutions together.

To heal divides and fix systemic issues in organizations, leaders should focus on starting honest conversations. Such communication should be focused on individuals with feedback metrics.

5. Celebrate both autonomy and relationships

Team cohesion impacts nearly every facet of your business. But particularly, it’s crucial for efficiency.

For that reason, autonomy remains one of the essential elements in building true employee engagement. It helps companies support a growth mindset, professional development and give employees the tools they need.

Further, businesses have resorted to a high level of autonomy resulting in a work- culture where owners and managers trust their teams to do their best.

When your entire organization is working toward shared goals, it’s appropriate to enjoy the accomplishment as a team creating value for customers. Rejoicing success is essential for maintaining the bond of a cohesive team.

Also, encouraging relationships in a company creates trust. Trust has four dimensions in organizational growth: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

Good leadership nurtures a cohesive culture that does not condemn errors or allows pointing fingers.

6. Promote an agile way of working

Agile adaptation to significant changes in business environments can give the company an edge in bloody ocean markets.

Every company can benefit from building nimble teams that can respond rapidly and effectively to business opportunities

There are different ways to create an agile workforce in an environment that ensures tensions do not drive anguish, resentment, or division, but effective productive discussions, success, and continuous learning.

Bonus Tip: It is not only employees who must trigger the change, and not only them who are good at blaming external factors for their lack of performance. Some old-fashioned leaders support the status quo, avoiding any change by making all kinds of excuses for themselves.

Don’t focus on the past. Neither should you ride on your past achievements. Focus on your employees and how to create value.

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happy-couple-doing-online-purchase-happy-together-1200x800.jpg

Apr 16, 2021 | Updated Apr 16, 2021 
By @JoshuaNgala

Customer experience is the number one brand differentiator. Specifically, it is the holistic perception of customers and their interactions with an organization and its products and services throughout their relationship, becoming happy and loyal.

The experience impacts all areas of business; feelings and emotions, and encompasses the entire customer journey.

Collaboration remains a top priority for businesses as the companies that focus on customer experience reduce churn and scale up their revenues.

Organizations have realized that an outstanding customer experience keeps customers coming back while spreading the word about their experience.

To rapidly address customer problems and drive innovation, the need of engaging an organization’s front-line employees to deliver on the customer strategy remains crucial.

For that reason, companies develop sets of principles for moving well beyond the basics of customer service by putting power, resources, and trust in the hands of value-zone employees.

You must have heard of some of the most common causes for bad customer experiences involving: difficult purchasing processes, negative experiences with customer support, compromising a customer’s security, waiting too long on hold, and Ignoring customer feedback.

Such mishaps violate consumer expectations. Consequently, customer care transformation is important as it compels companies to change their business models and adapt to the new market reality.

In the process, they establish critical enablers to drive transformational change via mindsets, behaviors and capabilities, technology enablement, operating model, and performance management.

Research by American Express found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. Such an empirical result means that any business model must therefore be customer-centric.

Here is a five-step process for moving beyond a suggestion-box mentality, to a strategy that will help you improve customer satisfaction and increase revenues:

Step 1: Create a clear customer experience vision

The first phase is top-management buy-in on a customer-centric strategy to ensure a shared vision. At this stage, you are connecting the front-line employees to the customer strategy.

The easiest way to define this vision is to create a set of guiding principles.

The set of rules drives the behavior of your organization embedded into all areas of training and development.

Such a top management approach can help in the re-alignment of corporate culture, training, work processes, and reward systems.

Importantly, the core customer journeys must be identified and transformed by redesigning and digitizing them.

Step 2: Understand your customers and create an emotional connection

A business needs to focus on its customers. One way to do this is to segment your customers and create personas to understand them better.

Get to know details of the needs, wants, and fears of the customers. This helps your organization to connect and empathize with the situations that your customers face.

Customers are 3 times more likely to purchase and recommend your product or service if they have an emotional connection with your brand.

Emotionally engaged customers have a higher lifetime value, as they tend to be loyal, satisfied, and ready to make new purchases.

A happy customer with her shopping bag. Photo/Pexels — A happy customer with her shopping bags. Photo/Pexels

Step 3: Empower your workforce, and invest in your frontline

How can you tell if you are delivering an excellent customer experience?

Getting customer feedback helps you know what customers think about the quality of your service compared to the customer experience principles you have defined.

Therefore, the use of a quality framework for the development of your team at every level makes them understand the customer strategy.

They also need simple problem-solving frameworks that are used throughout the organization to promote cross-hierarchical dialogue.

The quality framework takes this assessment one step further by scheduling and tracking your team’s development through coaching, eLearning, and group training.

The front office serves as the face of an employer. Often, it is the first and sometimes only people who the clients meet. This is not so different from other employees.

Too many companies are content to hire front-line staff without carefully considering whether they possess the right attitude and values to represent their brand.

The elephant in the room is what should be done to cure an institutional customer experience gap. The answer is: invest in them.

Step 4: Grant employees the opportunity to experiment

Most employees at the value zone know what ails a company. Sometimes even before management does or, at least, before management is willing to admit it.

They not only see service breakdowns but also opportunities for serving customers in entirely innovative ways. For that reason, an organization needs to act upon continuous employee feedback.

This can be done using tools that allow staff to share ideas on how to improve the customer experience and for managers to see how the staff is feeling towards the business.

The use of project management software or social media tools can leave continuous feedback.

Also, teaching front-line leaders the basics for designing simple experiments enables organizations to test many more ideas than could ever be orchestrated centrally.

For example, Amazon, where CEO Jeff Bezos often insists on leaving an empty chair at meetings to represent the “customer’s voice,” has a data-driven culture that actively encourages employees to build experiments based on customer insight.

Step 5: Eliminate the barriers, unnecessary bureaucracy

The biggest problem with the old-age organization structure is that it doesn’t support the people in the value zone-the place where value is truly created for customers.

When a leader holds too much power prevents the organization from becoming democratized, and the energy of the employees from being released.

People must align themselves and work together toward one goal. But it will not happen without a culture of trust.

Reduce the silos. Break down unnecessary bureaucracy, decision processes, or administrative work that impedes the front line to expeditiously serve customers.

Lack of trust among employees and management is a barrier to change of culture.

There are many ways to build trust, but one specific trust-building action is pushing the ‘envelope of transparency’.

Finally, the customer experience metric is one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations.

It helps them know if all this investment in teams, processes, and technology is working and paying off.

There are different software that can be used to measure the journey. Companies can connect with their customers in new and exciting ways, thanks to technology.

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Apr 10, 2021 | Updated Apr 14, 2021 
By @JoshuaNgala

Your first step to undertake a business venture is to have a purpose. The higher-order benefit your venture brings to the world in improving people’s lives should be creating value to consumers.

For every entrepreneur and startup, consumer benefit is linked to profit margin. But how then do you decide the price of your product?

Pricing is a process with the ultimate goal of defining a strategy that will maximize your revenue. Therefore, important to make decisions that help in arriving at the right pricing strategy for your business.

But the fact remains many people automatically think cost-based pricing which sometimes known as cost-plus when they think of “pricing strategy.”

In this stratagem, the company calculates costs, and then adds a healthy 20% margin on top. It works well for a few months until some unexpected costs crop up. Then the margin is cut to 5% and then 0% with huge losses.

The biggest mistake many businesses make is to believe that price alone drives sales. Sales are driven by your brand ideal. Its directly linked to Value-based pricing (VBP) by setting prices according to the perceived value of a product.

Below are three key reasons to base your pricing on customer value:

1. Opportunity for a business to know its customers

VBP gives businesses a very good perspective of their customer base by focusing on their willingness to pay for a product.

By placing a premium on the opinions of your customers, you are focusing on the people who will be making the buying decisions.

Important to know, customers don’t care about cost, they care about the value they are paying for. The strategy helps customers identify key value items (KVIs) as they decide on whether or not, your pricing and packaging is correct.

At this level, businesses enhance their consumer experience to customers. As a result, they grow strong brand image, and loyal customer base with increased demand and profit.

2. Helps in attracting customers based on their subjective assessment

Unlike cost-based pricing which involves adding up all the costs involved in creating and delivering a product, value-based pricing considers consumer experience. With it, the company enhances understanding of the value consumers get from the product.

Ideally, a product or service should be a solution to consumers. Value-based pricing is more common for services and cost-based pricing is more common for physical products.

To attract customers, especially if you are in the service industry, your cost-based pricing should not exceed the value that customers would put on your service.

You look for pricing information from the people who are going to make a decision depending on your price, your customers.

Photo/ cardboard box with red ribbon beside a sale sign.

3. Helps business build the best product

Pricing isn’t just about the number of phone call enquiries, or the visitors on your website. Marketing experts advise that consumers purchase products or services hoping to get results from one of these 3 core desires: wealth, health or relationships.

Market desires can only be satisfied through consumer knowledge. The knowledge of consumers helps a business in designing product packages and features.

Once you have developed your minimal viable product, the features and product updates should be driven by consumer demand.

It’s important for every entrepreneur to know details of needs, wants and fears of the customers to build the best product.

As you let consumers help you set prices, remember other important aspects of the market, such as competitor prices. Not considered accurately, can lead to a loss in profit margin despite an increase in sales.

As an entrepreneur, you should re-evaluate your pricing strategy every 6 months, and if there is room to raise prices you should.