Most of us are always trying to motivate somebody to do their best, or improve. Sometimes this is as simple as calling them into your office for a chat; easy when they are in the same building, but what about the ones without that proximity. I know from recent experience how much better a face to face meeting is compared to a conference call, but we should keep looking for ways to make remote and mobile staff feel part of the family.

The safety and well being of your employees is of paramount importance, as is their personal productivity. For many businesses today people are our most expensive and valued resource, employers have a duty of care to them, as they do to their employers.

SAFETY FIRST

From a safety perspective, the whereabouts of certain employees is of significant value. It is important that organisations recognise the responsibility they have for keeping their staff safe. Once the risks have been assessed, training is one of the most effective ways of ensuring that everyone understands what they can do to avoid becoming a victim of violence and aggression. Technology can be useful in backing up this training but can often be outside the price range of small organisations.

As usual, technology can help.

Remote and mobile staff always miss out on the attention of their managers, and whilst some are better at being self starters than others, everyone needs motivating and sometimes managing closely. Most employees would rather their employers take an active interest in both their wellbeing during work time, and their performance on a daily weekly or monthly basis. People generally need a yardstick to measure themselves against, and where management interest is not focused on staff  performance, it inevitably suffers and declines: sometimes sooner sometimes later.

If remote and mobile service and sales staff know that management are paying close attention to their activities, the chances are that performance will improve. There is also the opportunity to ensure that best practice is adhered to, and concentration is  on saving costs where possible, thus ensuring more secure long term employment. An obvious case would be where a service team  of several individuals is covering a wide geographical area, where customer satisfaction and  customer retention, is of great importance. If management are intimately aware of relative staff locations and job progress, decisions can be made to deploy the closest or most available unit to attend to the next call, rather than just give the team a rigid list. In any event, whatever deployment of resource is made, the closest or most available, savings have been made. In the case of the closest, fuel, and in the case of the most available, customer satisfaction and retention.

DYNAMIC RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Dynamic resource management, responding to just in time availability, can transform the perception of a service or sales organisation in the eyes of the customer, and we know from long experience that generally customers continue buying from organisations that deliver exceptional service. Good is just not good enough in an economic climate where less reputable outfits will undercut on price and tar everyone with the poor service brush. Maintaining  service excellence, and continually ensuring that the customers perception of your company is at the highest level ensures retention of that customer.

If you have spent years building up a business you already know how much effort you have to put into securing new business, and you therefore know how much it costs to get new business. It would seem to make sense then to bend over backwards to ensure they dont just go away through poor service and indifference.

This dymamic management eventually develops into a virtuous circle where on the one hand, perceived service response times improve, and customer satisfaction goes up, enabling more consistent referrals from a satisfied pool of clients, enabling salespeople to maximise their time in front of new prospects as some referral credibility has already been established, enabling the prospect to take a more positive view of your company’s products and services because awareness of good service from existing customers has already been instilled, leading to more conversions from initial approaches, in effect, reducing the cost of sales.

MANAGING MOTIVATING & INCENTIVISING

The foundation stone of these improvements lies in the ability of central management to manage, motivate, incentivise and retain expensive good staff. Amongst the myriad ways of achieving this holy grail of a virtuous circle of improved customer perception and efffectively reduced cost of sale, technology has to play a large part.

Lets admit it;   if we could, we would have a central office where all staff came to and went from daily. Where the simple  interaction of all staff with all management, and the intimate understanding of issues, opportunities and challenges would make a lot of problems irrelevant. Where a sense of “team” would be more prevalent.

Reality is usually a fragile grasp on what is going on daily with remote and mobile staff, with their personal issues, fears and motivations, let alone how effective was their interaction with the customers which remains a mystery until the next visit to head office.

As any reasonable person would expect, the full on attention of ones immediate manager is a two edged sword. On the one hand, there will be plenty of opportunities to learn from the expert, and on the other hand, suffer a thousand deaths by an obsessive who cannot function without organizing every last minute of their day. But that should not get in the way of ensuring that the wellbeing of remote and mobile staff is higher in the conscious understanding of management than has perhaps been the case up to now.

WHERE ARE YOU? RIGHT NOW.

Mostly,  the whereabouts of that elusive, expensive service fleet or sales force is guesswork. Information based upon hours old or even days old knowledge provided by reports emailed in, or hastily made phone calls from the hard shoulder of the M6. It is not a very effective or accurate way to assess the availability of your resources. You would not rely on guesswork in a manufacturing or logistics environment, so why should not the same level of accuracy be visited upon one of the most important assets your business possesses?

In the public sector, in healthcare or social services, or even the police, the same need for accuracy is there. The important difference in these cases being that without accurate information about where someone is or has just been, people can get hurt, as volatile and anxious clients or patients are a best unpredictable.

It is here that technology can help. Alongside the usual panoply of collaboration techniques such as conferencing, video or audio, mobile or paging communication, comes Location Services from Locatorz: Locating People At The Touch of a Button. Visit www.locatorz.co.uk for more information. Allowing management, through an accurate understanding of exactly where everyone is, to make the most economic and customer-satisfactory deployments of staff as possible, helping remote and mobile staff meet and exceed their targets through the sensible use of the scarce resource they represent. Effectively reducing in some cases the thrashing up and down the motorway that an inadequate understanding of the disposition of the available resources usually results in. A resultant benefit for remote and mobile staff is increased job satisfaction through intelligent management application of better more accurate awareness of where they are and how they are disposed.

Accurate Location Services takes the guesswork out of deploying one of the organization’s most important assets: People. By knowing where they  are,  right now, the right decisions can be made and the right perception can be planted in the all important customers mind. The start of the virtuous circle of customer satisfaction through exceeding expectations to ultimate customer retention has begun.

In the previous episode we looked at the difference between Leadership and Management, and why it is crucial to focus on both to become the extraordinary enterprise, rather than just run-of-the-mill.

To some people leadership looks and feels natural, but the confidence to lead is not inbuilt. That confidence did not just appear. Since childhood the “natural” leader has been trying things out, and getting things wrong, half right or perfect over many years before assuming a position in which they obviously feel comfortable but probably never analysed to any great degree; to them its just the way it is. And of course whilst they might be good at painting the forward looking picture of the organisation, and “leading from the front” they may be incompetent at a whole range of things that equally need doing just as urgently. This where the power of the TEAM comes in. Many business leaders find themselves in leadership positions unexpectedly, and feel that they are ill-prepared for the task ahead, but not being the “natural” leader should not be a hindrance to leadership success in the extraordinary enterprise.

It is recognising that for each employee the level of leadership that is needed is different that makes the great leader. It is understanding that in any organisation it is the TEAM and its power when harnessed correctly and not wastefully that determines extraordinary performance, not the clinging to the details oneself. And in the many different teams that make up the enterprise, it is giving permission to team managers and members to take leadership responsibility, again that word EMPOWERMENT, that delivers extraordinary performance. And once the team has been given permission to lead it is the overall leaders task to communicate to all the members of the enterprise who is doing what, why and to whom and for whom. Just because others have permission to lead does not mean laissez faire management. It means that true delegation with responsibility is in place, and the Leader can devote time to other tasks.

Some of those other tasks might be:  Keeping people with you: Allowing the team to do its work: Being decisive but slowly and deliberately based on adequate information:Playing people in the right position: Being consistent and behaviourally  predictable.

In the next episode I will explore the art of Delegation (assign, entrust, empower, pass on, hand on/over, turn over, devolve, depute, transfer.)

In differentiating the run of the mill enterprise from the extraordinary one, I have explored a couple of attributes common to many successful CEOs: Empowerment and Recruiting for the future.  In this episode of this 4 part series, I will look at what happens when Leadership is absent allowing Management to hold too much sway.

Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do what you want because he wants to do it.

Management: The process of dealing with or controlling things or people.

It looks pretty clear from the above definitions that these are two very different things, both of which are essential to the extraordinary enterprise. It is likely that the run of the mill enterprise has only one of these. What characterises the organisation without clear leadership is a sense of confusion or uncertainty about “the mission”. It is where there is an obvious disconnect between sales and service, the “who sold you this then” mentality. The command and control micro manager is in charge here where the disinterested receptionist or telephone operator just can’t be bothered, or where any unattended phone in the office is never answered.

We have all experienced these levels of service at some point in our lives, and we have all probably asked ourselves “just how difficult can it be to get service to talk to sales?” (or vice versa) or “why doesn’t somebody pick up the phone?” In any organisation where the emphasis is on control rather than empowerment it won’t matter how many processes, checkpoints, targets or review mechanisms are put in place, the outcome will be the same; disconnected islands of endeavour with no overall idea of the big picture. People doing what is demanded of them but no more, because they are not aware of the need to do anything else that might better fit the goals and objectives of the organisation.

Sure, management is absolutely necessary to allocate roles and responsibilities, and even to keep score. But if management exists in a vacuum no one will be able to lift their heads up  for a moment to see if the horizon is getting nearer, because no one has set out a clear direction to look towards.

Leadership provides the focus for everyone’s emotional and intellectual engagement in your business. It organises everybody’s energies to point in the same direction. Strong, visible, confident and honest leadership provides a clear sense of direction and purpose and defines the framework for everyone to operate in: both employees and customers.

Previously we explored the area of EMPOWERMENT. In brief, the “don’t hire a dog and bark yourself” guide.

Now we will explore some of the barriers to success.  Building a successful business is a bit like that old nursery trick of trying to rub your stomach in a circular motion whilst simultaneously patting yourself on the top of your head. It IS difficult. But then if it was easy everyone would be successful. Clearly this is not the case. What differentiates the run-of-the-mill from the extraordinary enterprise is the seemingly effortless ability to advance simultaneously on several fronts, whilst maintaining core business stability.

For example, there are many examples of successful companies who started out with a single product/service dream and have simply stuck to their knitting. The sales remain largely constant, their costs are predictable. Someone is making a reasonable living from this business. The vulnerability here is what used be the strength of the offering at the start: the single focus. If the offering loses its USP or just goes out of fashion, or the customers evaporate, what used to be a decent living becomes a struggle for survival, because there is no where else to look for revenue. There is only one string to this bow.

Going back to the more extraordinary business advancing on many fronts simultaneously; how do they do it? Firstly they probably started off on the same track as my first example with a single product/service dream.  They probably achieved a level of predictability from the business. They too were making a decent living from their efforts, but this is where the path of the extraordinary enterprise diverges from the run of the mill.

In building the core business, the main focus in recruiting was on the ability of the ones hired to accept EMPOWERMENT:  to understand a brief and work without supervision. To buy into a clear vision of the future set out by the CEO: to have the opportunity to earn well as long as targets are met.  Once this state of grace has been achieved, predictability and manageability, the good CEO can delegate the execution of the core business in confidence to the good people he hired at the outset. His involvement thenceforward could be restricted to monitoring the Key Performance Indicators, only stepping in when needed.

So how much time does the extraordinary CEO now spend on THE NOW and how much does he have at his disposal to focus on reeling in the future?

Guy Norgrove

“Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.”

The path to success is strewn with good intentions, to paraphrase a well know saying, but many of you will know there is no single recipe that guarantees a way through. And whilst it might be useful in a voyeuristic way to track the habits and obsessions of the rich and famous, business is more about finding out what works best for you and your potential customers.

In this months article I will be exploring the issue that chokes many a small business: Trust. How to empower, delegate, allow to fail. In growing any business, the power of The Team must be engaged fully or burn out will quickly follow in a morass of micro-management and broken promises. By sticking to some very straightforward principles, this can be avoided. You don’t buy a dog and then bark yourself, do you? But, as I said earlier, see what works best for you.

Till next time.

EMPOWERMENT OR HOW TO MAINTAIN FORWARD MOMENTUM AND ACHIEVE GROWTH

You would think that the world had indeed ended if you listened only to the news and professional pundits, and of course it fits their bill to big up the worst of the stories. It sells whatever they have to sell and let’s face it, it seems that nearly everyone sits up and takes notice of bad news but just glides over the good stuff. Such is life, but the more discerning of you will know that the gross excesses of a bunch of bankers and an out of touch government & opposition have not and could not change the laws of physics, economics or anything really.

So how does this apply to your business? I am mainly addressing the Small Medium sector here, but very much like Mrs T in the 80s, if you treat the national economy the same way you treat your household budget you won’t go far wrong, so this also applies to large enterprises; it just isn’t as urgent in the bigger ones.

With most smaller enterprises, from say, 5 employees up to about 35 or so, the main daily fight is the chasing down of cash, followed nearly equally urgently by the chasing down of new orders and the fulfilment of existing ones. This does not leave much time, if any it seems, to focus on the bigger picture of how to reel in the future and address the opportunities that growth would provide. In reality, dealing with THE NOW is all most people can handle.

In many organisations of this size there is a simple reason for this inability to look to the future: EMPOWERMENT.

Now I don’t want to call anyone’s baby ugly, but a lot of owner led businesses can only focus on THE NOW because they fail to EMPOWER the people they employ to help them deal with it.

They persist in having a finger in every part of the pie and hesitate to listen to any external or internal advice as to how things might be improved. This ensures that nearly 100% of the owners time is spent on THE NOW, and 0% is spent on where they should be going, getting to, reaching, or achieving.

There are lessons to be learnt from large corporations in this area. In many successful growing businesses a small number of high achievers actually earn more than the “boss”. Does the boss care? Not if (s)he has any sense. His targets are being met and exceeded, his plan starts to look achievable and, because he has EMPOWERED people to get on with an aspect of the business at which they are better than himself, his time is freed up to look at other issues. Such as GROWTH and LEADERSHIP.

Many leaders find it difficult to TRUST. Rather than allow other people to (potentially) fail, their first instinct when a problem arises is to get stuck in and do it themselves, just because they cannot put their TRUST in the very people they have hired.How can this be when they themselves have hired these people to execute a particular role? The probability is that one of the following has occurred:

1. They have hired good people and then kept them in the dark, expecting them to be almost clairvoyant in working out how to do the job. Being good people who care about failing, they leave.
EXPENSIVE
2. They have hired poor people, “Yes” people who pose no threat, and then exercised “Command & Control “ on them, leaving them ill equipped to use any initiative, and remaining a “do-the-barest-minimum“ resource. These people become internal terrorists because they don’t feel valued and are the “jobsworth” of inter departmental co-operation. They don’t leave.
EXPENSIVE
3. They have hired people on price, and then ask them to do a job they are ill equipped to complete to anyone’s satisfaction. They don’t leave but the customers do, because nothing gets done properly.
EXPENSIVE

Expensive both in terms of money and TIME, because in any of the above scenarios the leader has to get involved in the NOW to get things fixed, leaving little or no time for the future.

There is no one size fits all answer to this issue, but there are ways to improve a less than ideal situation.

This blog has also been posted on Guy’s page at The Academy for Chief Executives and at Fresh Business Thinking