Leaders need to be prepared during this economic descent

I was asked not long before the economic crises hit, what can leaders do to prepare themselves for the descent...

There is no question that the economy is in a downward spiral. Leaders need to distribute custom-made parachutes across the business and pull the right cords to ensure a smooth landing. The economic downturn, no matter the industry you are in, is no longer a prediction. Business leaders and key decision makers are well and truly living this situation right now.

Reading the latest economic reports, we are all in this for a minimum of 12–18 months. The moment the pinch is feltin the home is the instant business knows the tough times are
everywhere. Add to that, we live in a 24-hour information cycle. When news breaks, people know it, and economic news breaks every day on the hour. Even if your company’s revenues have held up, your employees know there’s trouble and they’re nervous. It’s time now to act practically… everyone knows, and employees want to know what their leaders are doing to set the organisation up for a smooth landing.

The essential elements or chords that leaders need to be pulling on behalf of their organisation to navigate a smooth landing during this bumpy economic downturn include:

Communication – internally and externally

There is no telling what lies ahead in the next several months – with the exception of it’s not going to get any easier quickly. The best thing leaders can do is communicate and connect
with your people immediately with the plan and what they can do. They may be nervous but they also want to know they can help, and how. How you share that message is as important as the message itself – what is it you want your people to think, feel and do? How do you share the message in a compelling and creative way so that the message sticks and appropriate action is taken?

The secondary element of communication is ensuring you are communicating your strategy and product/service message the market effectively.

Coaching strong performers to retain them

Coaching becomes even more critical during times of change and crisis, when people are feeling uncertain and anxious about the future.

Coaching helps people to develop their ability, knowledge and confidence to improve their performance and/or achieve their potential.

Strengthening and developing your teams

In challenging economic and financial times a classic knee-jerk reaction in suffering businesses is to control costs by cutting the “soft stuff” – principally HR or professional development programs. The paradox is that these very times require staff whoare engaged, supported, committed and able to perform at their best. The other common reaction is “the freeze”, which essentially means the same number of people to perform a growing amount of work.

The foundation stone for a high performance yet supportive culture is quality teams. High performance executive teams will ensure the strategy is agile and responsive while imultaneously role modelling effective leadership and shaping the culture. High performance work teams will ensure seamless, efficient execution of the strategy and will become the single most important tool for retaining and motivating the invaluable people that you can’t afford to lose.

Accountability

The current challenging market conditions have increased the need to ensure that everything that you do produces results. It is in the tough times that the most astute leaders set their
companies up for future success. Ensuring that you build a culture of accountability – one that continually produces the goals that your organisation sets – is one of the wisest decisions that you can make.

In an accountability culture, employees develop the confidence to develop plans that they know they can execute. They have the mindset, language and skills to effectively negotiate agreements, assess and manage the risks associated with delivering on those promises and being accountable as well as holding others to account in managing the consequences (both positive and
negative) of the outcomes delivered.

The most effective leaders are able to see opportunities that others can’t. The decisions that you make now will determine the short and long term results that you create in the future.

Tread carefully during restructuring – your employee brand reputation could be at stake

Redundancies, restructuring and rebuilding are unfortunate realities continuing to be faced by businesses today. Albeit understandable that a prominent level of attention is given to employees who are leaving the organisation, due attention must also be given to the employees that remain, and their role in maintaining and building relationships with customers. Unique changes and transitions within the business landscape face us daily. These realities make finding the answers to two key questions more imperative for business success today than ever before:

1. Would you recommend our brand, product or service to a friend or colleague?
2. Would you recommend working for this company to a friend or colleague?

The crux of the challenge for business leaders is establishing a tangible connection between the degree of customer loyalty on an external level, and the degree of employee engagement on an internal level. Now more than ever brand loyalty from both customers and employees is critical. In a time when a majority of businesses are reducing their workforces, maintaining deliverable value and internal standards of quality and satisfaction are instrumental in shaping and delivering on revised business strategies. There is mounting quantitative evidence that the link between employee engagement and customer loyalty is significant. For example, Fortune 100 clients report “there was a 1,000% increase in errors among disengaged versus engaged employee populations; and 75% of high-performing companies hold managers accountable for engaging their employees”.

Businesses can no longer create and disseminate messages in a vacuum and expect to maintain strong reputations and relationships with their employees or clients. But what can senior managers do to regain some of this lost control to rebuild ailing relationships that will come to par following the increasing numbers of redundancies and loss of ‘loyal’ clients across industry? The answer lies in the ability to quantify two key business drivers – customer loyalty and employee engagement; and then to shape the strategies and culture based upon this data.

Talent management and leadership have taken on renewed importance as competition to attract and retain high performing loyal employees becomes increasingly fierce. Thus, the employee experience becomes just as important as the customer’s. As the competitive playing field has levelled, in that every company has access to the same technology, companies have begun to realise that differentiation is related to their ability to attract and retain quality human capital.

Whilst companies are reducing, restructuring and rebuilding their workforces and organisations, it is imperative that they partner with experienced advisors who sit outside the organisation to provide a learned perspective on their sourcing, assessment and development needs.

Optimisation of human capital is virtually every company’s goal with the price being a level of discretionary effort that results in loyal employees and customers. Delivering superior customer experiences boils down to making an extra effort internally, one that is consistently better than the competition. The employee experience is based on a 360-degree outlook: culture, values, beliefs, flexibility and balance are integral to the decision to become an employee. Then, desires, expectations, growth, development and participation contribute to the overall contentment in a position. However, there is more to it than just the individual employee’s perspective. The workplace, environment, leadership and brand all interact to shape the corporate culture.

Finally, compensation, benefits, recognition and promotions determine the employee’s decision to stay with a particular company, or to look for a better opportunity. Research confirms that these ‘bread and butter’ issues are seldom what drive commitment or discretional effort. It is the less tangible dimensions of employee engagement that virtually all companies are after, but few recognise or understand how to achieve it. The companies with the greatest reputations have rigorous employee sourcing, assessment and development programs that sets the organisation up to cope with, for example, change internally and externally – especially in the context of economic stress or high risk situations and ensures an overarching practice of delivering on a positive reputation in all that the company does.

Reputation, from a simplistic perspective, requires a focus on the talent that remains in the organisation during a restructure, the attraction of experienced and suitably qualified talent and robust development and retention strategies to build employee loyalty, and in the end, customer attraction and loyalty. Albeit the attention for today is on minimising costs to survive, leaders also need to look to the future and ensure their workforce is prepared for the next economic chapter.

Getting the best out of your Market Surveys

I was asked 'how can marketers get the best out of their market research to identify what their next steps should be? The question was posed not long after the Australian economy started to change, and and this was my response:

Common Purpose of Market Research

Companies conduct market research hoping to capture some sense of their market and their customers to develop a product, service, or response on the ideas or findings raised in the research. Discovering the facts in these findings – who, what, where, when, how, and, most importantly, why – is a challenge.

Traditional Market Research

Traditionally, market research will give you what is referred to as ‘customer facts’ which come in the form of structured data obtained through traditional structured surveys. These surveys provide details
around purchase history, coded responses to surveys, service streams, and so on.

Less Traditional…Yet More Important

A second and less common form of data is instructured data or ‘first person data’. Unstructured data includes call-centre notes, open note sections of surveys, emails, weblogs, chat rooms, online forums,
product reviews, and others. To truly get as complete a picture as possible around your customer/client base and market, both structured and unstructured data must be incorporated into the intelligence and analysis of market research.

The following focuses primarily on preparing your traditional market research survey.

Structuring your Research

In structuring your research, the following should be considered:
The differences between self-administered questionnaires and professional interviewer questionnaires

Knowing what questions should be asked where within the questionnaire

Understanding how to phrase questions

Being sensitive to questionnaire length.

Self-Administered vs Interviewer-Administered Questionnaires

Self-administered questionnaires are risky and impersonal. If you do not have the in-house expertise in preparing questionnaires, this can be a high-risk consideration. A recent study stated that fifty per cent
of respondents lose patience with self-administered questionnaires due to incorrect structure and methods of questioning.

Interviewer-administered questionnaires are prepared and facilitated by researchers who are trained in responding to differing types of
answers that could roadblock a self-administered questionnaire.

Researchers can walk respondents through the questionnaire and follow patterns generated by the answers given at the time.

Knowing What Questions Should be Asked

Questionnaires have a flow to them, usually from the general to the specific. There are no hard and fast rules around what questions should and should not be asked, as this is dependent on the purpose of the research.

It is suggested, however, that you keep these guides in mind:

• Keep the respondent in one mindset at a time
• Ask the easy questions first, place more involved questions toward the middle of the questionnaire and save sensitive questions
  for the end
• Understand how to phrase questions
• Being Sensitive to Questionnaire Length Questionnaire length is dictated by the study objectives. Some questionnaires take five minutes’worth of questions to address the objectives; others take an hour.
• Questioning the respondent in a professional and considerate manner is where your focus should be.

The most important component of market research is to be very clear on the objective of the research. Approaching market research without
a plan will merely provide you with nice-to-know numbers. You need to have a central core strategy against which to analyse those numbers to give you the desired direction.