Often we designate the employees as one of our key target audiences or stakeholder in our planning documents. This is all a good thing. However, being the provocative person that I am, I have to ask, “Is that really what you want to do?” I would suggest that communicating usually means creating and delivering messages to an audience.

Further, I would suggest that what you really want to do is facilitate a conversation or a dialogue with your employee community. For many, you are probably saying, “That’s just semantics — that’s what we mean”, so let me ask, “Is that what is happening?”

Are you facilitating a conversation? Do you have a process set up that stimulates a conversation or is your messaging primarily just being pushed out from the communications team? That distinction is more than semantics. It is why organizations struggle – and often fail – to generate meaningful employee engagement. We get blinded by the belief that because we are actively communicating, we believe we are engaging employees in a conversation. Bottom line, if it isn’t two-way, it isn’t communication. It’s simply message distribution.

Let me share how the internal newsletter we set up at ServiceOntario was envisioned. Rather than having someone in the Marketing team write the newsletter, they acted primarily as an Editor who worked with an Editorial Board who was responsible for generating the content.

This Board was made up of writers from across all divisions in the organization. Level or function were not relevant, their only commonality was their interest in sharing what was happening in their areas of work. They also had pretty free rein on topics for publishing.

The Editor compiled their articles and reviewed them for general appropriateness, spelling, grammar, etc. They did not re-write the articles. The Editor also included news that was relevant to the organization on behalf of the organization. Resultant we had a newsletter that reflected the wider organization while still containing important organizational communications/news. It was filled with topics (with lots of pictures) of things that were of interest to the people across the organization — not just management.

The result? People looked forward to receiving and reading it each month. Plus, people saw demonstrated behaviour that management was interested in hearing from them — a very important signal to the organization.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a systematic approach to sharing information and gathering feedback/input. So ask yourself, is your internal communications really communicating — or just delivering messages.

Something to think about.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

Galati’s main point is as true today as it was then — that while many companies claim to be focused on their customers, they are unable to deliver on these promises within their current company culture. His basis for this argument is that companies continue to focus on their own needs versus the customer needs.

Gulati identified four values that companies must adopt in order to successfully be customer-focused. These are coordination, cooperation, capability and connection.

Coordination: Most companies are organized around a specific function, product or geographical location. However, customers don’t think that way, and often the solutions they need do not fit within those boundaries. Gulati suggests that companies need to create processes or mechanisms that break these divisions – or silos – so that the customer gets the benefit of the entire company.

Cooperation: Here the focus is two-fold. Separate business units need to cooperate to support each other’s activities to achieve measurable customer satisfaction, and employees who are closest to customers need the authority to make decisions that benefit the customer. This kind of cooperation ensures the customer always comes first.

Capability: According to Gulati, companies need more “generalists”. These are described as employees who “have experience in several products or services and a deep knowledge of customer needs” as well as having the skill and flexibility to cross organizational boundaries. These people see the big picture and resultant are able to produce tailored solutions that meet customer needs.

Connection: Gulati’s research supports aligning with suppliers and partners. The rationale is that it support better solutions for the customer as well as provide cost-cutting opportunities.

Gulati’s four “CAS” make sense, as they provide companies with a process map that focuses on the customer. Interesting to note, everything still focuses on the big “C” — the customer.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

Most importantly, you must focus on the situation or issue versus the person, while sharing a more appropriate course of action. We all need to avoid falling into the trap of confusing criticism with constructive feedback.

Constructive feedback is information-specific, issue-focused, and based on observations, while criticism is a personal judgment about a performance effort or outcome, usually given is general and vague manner, focused on the person, and based on opinions or feelings

These steps you will help you have more success.

1. Describe: Start by describing what the person did accurately and concisely. Be objective and neutral — remember, how we say something is just as important as what we say. Provide specifics of what happened and do not exaggerate or minimize the situation. Focus on the positive contribution.

2. Explain: Explain the impact of the behaviour on the customer, team or organization. These need to be observations of what you have seen or heard — not your interpretations or opinions. Observations are factual and non-judgmental. It is helpful to start focused on ‘I’. ‘I notice’, ‘I have seen’ or even I have been told’. This will help keep the discussion issue focused. Avoid using ‘but’, ‘although’ or ‘however’ to link this to the first section. These words create contradictions and send a mixed message that effectively negates any positive message you started with.

3. Suggest: Suggest specific changes that you would like to see made and explain what you want the person to do differently. The more specific, the more likely they person will be able to implement the suggestion next time.

4. Commit: Seek a commitment to change. Be clear on the consequences of continuing in this vein. Seek an agreement about the new, modified behaviour. In extreme cases, be clear of the consequences of not making these changes — but again be objective and neutral to minimize this sounding like a threat.

Example: One of your team is being described as harsh or bossy when providing direction to other team members.

Describe: Bill, I really appreciate that you have taken ownership of this project and are providing clear, well thought-out input on what next steps are needed. I wanted to let you know how valuable this is to the team and the overall success of the project.

Explain: I notice that sometimes when you provide direction to other team members, you are very quick and specific when giving input — which sometimes creates the impression that you don’t value their input and think that only your way is the correct way.

Suggest: I’d like to suggest that you take some time to understand why they did it the way they chose and what next steps they are considering. Then building on their ideas, share some additional thoughts on how they can accomplish their goal.

Commit: That way, they will feel that you are adding to their thoughts and helping them be more successful. Does that make sense? Would you give that a try next time and let me know how it works?

Feedback should be given, as close as possible to when the performance incident occurs so that the events are fresh in everyone’s minds. When feedback is given well after the fact, the value of the constructive feedback is lessened.

The exception may be when giving negative feedback. Sometimes when a negative incident happens you may need time to get your thoughts in order before you give negative feedback (coming on too strong or in an angry manner will negate any good you hope to achieve). Giving the feedback tomorrow rather than immediately will come across as far more constructive — and tomorrow is still timely.

Lastly — and hopefully these go without saying — your feedback should be person-to-person versus in writing. The very nature of feedback is a mentoring/coaching activity, which should be done verbally and informally. You should also provide positive feedback in the same manner at least as often as you provide corrective feedback.

By focusing on the positive and keeping the discussion fact based when providing correction, you are able to modify and build new behaviours, without challenging their current behaviours. What do you think? Is it worth a try?

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

If I was to ask you who you‟re working for, what would you say?

a) Your company?

b) Your boss?

c) Yourself?

d) Your customers?

Most people, when they are honest, answer a, b or even c. But if you answered d, are you really working for your customers, or just paying lip service to it?

It seems everyone is talking about “customer-focus”. I love the phrase “customer-focus” because it recognises a fundamental truth that too many people seem to forget – that customers are your raison d‟être – whether your company deals with consumers, other businesses, or both. Your customers pay your salary, not some faceless company.

Being customer-focused makes more than just instinctive sense, the more focussed you are on customers; the more likely you are to meet and exceed their expectations, needs and wants. And the more you meet and exceed their expectations, needs and wants, the more likely you are to have happy, loyal customers. And the more happy and loyal your customers are, the more likely they are to spend above the category average with you. A win-win situation, if ever there was one.

I‟m not going to pretend that being customer-focused is easy — because it’s not. It requires an absolute dedication to the cause, starting from the top, right on down throughout the organization. But the process involved is relatively simple.

I‟ve broken it down into two lists – things you Need To Do, and things you Need To Review.

Need to Do

1. Listen. To your customers, to the market, to your staff. And never stop listening. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you know everything you need to know about people. Through listening come insights and insights are what drive any business.

Take FedEx for example. Years ago, when listening to people talk about their delivery needs, they realised that there was a market need for overnight deliveries guaranteed to arrive at a specific time the next day. The likely cost of this service was such that it would only be used when deliveries really did have to get there on time – so the on time guarantee meant everything. And FedEx delivers… that’s why they’re the #1 express transportation company.

1. Take Ownership. Own every issue that affects your customers, even if you don’t technically own what‟s causing the problem. You may not have full control over your customers‟ experiences, but if your customers are disappointed by something while using your brand, you‟d better take ownership of the problem, and fix it. Because it‟s your brand that will take the flak… and the glory.

For example, when Virgin took over the two British Rail franchises in 1997, all it „owned‟ was the right to run certain timetables on certain tracks. The trains belonged to another company, as did the railway infrastructure. So, when a train was delayed as a result of a signalling problem, Virgin took responsibility for solving the problem on their customers‟ behalf – apologising and paying them compensation, while working behind the scenes with Railtrack to attempt to make sure the problem didn‟t happen again. The bottom line was that the customers were sitting in a Virgin train when the delay occurred.

3. Be Consistent. Your customers need to know what to expect from you – not in a boring and repetitive way, but rather in terms of the quality and type of response you‟ll give them. By all means, do the unexpected, exceed their expectation – but always do it in a way that’s consistent with their needs and wants, and your brand.

Southwest Airlines is a great example of this – you don’t always know what they have in store for you on a flight, but you do always know that it‟ll be something you like.

4. Attention To Detail. Attention to detail is all about showing your customers that there is nothing you won‟t do in order to give them the best possible Customer Experience.

It’s about that chocolate on your hotel pillow, that massage on your transatlantic flight, that reminder text about your partner‟s birthday, that unsolicited call to see if you‟ve any problems using your new handset. It’s also about not being satisfied with anything less than perfection – about arriving exactly on time, about returning calls exactly when you say you will, about having wait times that last no more than the time you say they will.

5. Watch Your Language! I’m not suggesting you’re swearing at your customers…actually, it’s worse! You’re talking about them behind their backs in a pretty disparaging way. Hands up all of you who segment your customers by value, calling some your „most important/valuable‟ customers, and, by implication, others your „least important/valuable‟ customers? Many of you who segment your customers by lifestyle/lifestage, use quite unflattering names to describe certain segments?

Language guides behaviour and attitudes. So if you refer to your „least important‟ customers in internal discussions or briefings, then there’s a strong chance that your employees will treat those particular customers as though they don’t matter.

You don’t mean for that to happen, but it does. Likewise with the lifestyle segments. Beware of using a single photo or personality to characterise a particular segment – Colin Farrell/Britney Spears may seem to characterise your „fast and loose‟ segment, but not everyone in that segment will be just like them. Instead of „most important/valuable ‟customers, how about something innocuous like „highest yield/highest spending?‟

6. Measure Your Results. The only way to know if you‟re really customer-focused is to ask them. Find out from your customers which particular aspects or attributes of your product or service are most important to them — whether it‟s reducing wait times in retail outlets, or arriving on time, or having mobile coverage wherever you are, or having the latest fashions in stock, or having the best prices. The key here is „from your customers‟ — never presume that you know what they are.

When you know what to measure, set up independent monitoring systems — usually a combination of qualitative (to explore) and quantitative (to validate and track) research. Establish the benchmark levels for the attributes, set realistic short and long term targets, and then see how you do.

Need To Review

1. Your Brand. Does your brand stand for something that’s in keeping with the various needs and wants of your customers? If all of your employees „lived‟ the brand’s values, would the effect on your customers be positive? Too often, the brand dictates what a company does for its customers, whereas if you really customer-focused, then the needs/wants of customers should inform the brand.

2. Your Organization. Your organisational structure, your policies, your processes. Everything you do internally affects your customers. Does your structure encourage cross-functional working? Is it clear who is responsible for what? If your staff find it hard to manoeuvre around your business, then that will feed through to your customers – in the form of too much red tape, poor staff attitude (disgruntled staff  happy customers), inflexibility, lack of product knowledge, lack of consistency.

3. Your Products/Services. Do your products/services meet the various needs and wants of your customers? Are they consistent with your brand? Too often, products/services are driven by other competencies of the company, such as technology, or even by the Finance department.

4. Your Communication. Is the content of interest/relevant to customers? Does it demonstrate how your company delivers a better customer experience? Is the tone of voice used consistent with your brand’s values? And for communications within your company, are your employees getting the information they need to do their jobs to the best of their abilities? And are they getting it via the most suitable channels for the jobs they do (e.g. road-based staff need different channels from office based staff)? Are they getting it when they need it? It’s the internal communications that are most often neglected. And in many ways, they’re more important than your external communications — poorly informed staff will not deliver the best possible customer experience.

So, who are you working for now? Do you have the right processes and tools in place to be successful?

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

1. Lead By Example: Leaders set the tone and direction. Make customer service a key priority. Make sure your own behaviours are ones you want modeled by your team.

2. Involve Your Customers: No one knows what your customers want better than your customers. If you ask them with genuine interest, they will tell you.

3. Engage Your Team: Your team understands your customers and how to deliver the service they want. Include them in gathering customer information, setting standards and designing processes.

4. Set Expectations: Publish your service standards so your team and customers are clear on expectations. You can never exceed expectations if you don’t set them.

5. Solicit Feedback: Be a good listener. Make it easy for customers and your team to provide ongoing feedback about how to improve the service experience — both good and bad. Follow up and ask open-ended questions.

6. Be Customer-Focused: Put your customer needs ahead of your own. Design your processes and policies with your customer in mind.

7. Provide Tools: Develop tools and processes that help your team understand the customer and equip them to deliver a consistent customer experience.

8. Empower Your Team: No one turns an unhappy customer into a fan faster or better than a team member empowered to instantly fix the situation. Provide training and guidelines — then trust them to make the right decision.

9. Measure What You Want Done: Create a balanced performance scorecard that measures financial, productivity and customer experience. What gets measured gets done.

10. Recognize Performance: Establish a program to nurture and recognize outstanding performance. Make sure both customers and team members are encouraged to participate. Continuous improvement needs reinforcement. An ongoing recognition program keeps customer service in focus.

11. Say Thank You: Thank your team for their hard work. Thank your customers for their business, their feedback and their complaints. Remember, without them you have no business.

12. Have Fun: Remember — you chose to be in a customer service business. Choose your attitude and enjoy the opportunity to make a positive impact on someone’s day. Your attitude will rub off on your team and your customers.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserve

1. A Customer-focused Vision: Nothing is more important than a clear vision. In a customer-focused organization, the vision that is not just making money, but has the customer as a central element. Every person should understand what that vision is — and how their role within the organization contributes directly to the implementation of that vision. A well-defined and widely shared and understood vision will allow the organization to work in alignment towards serving your customers well.

2. Inculcate the Voice of the Customer: Understand your customer intimately. Make sure your decision-making process includes their voice at the table. Evaluate all your processes and procedures to ensure they are designed with the customer in mind — not the organization. You will revolutionize your own behaviour and create linkages to your customers your competition will never duplicate.

3. Be a Student of the Best: Be a life-long learner. Study the methods of other successful companies, and share your learning in return. Japanese companies learned how to be great after World War II. Some North American companies have made great comebacks after studying those from around the world — while other have chosen not to learn and suffered greatly as a result (American Auto Industry comes to mind.)

4. Empower Your Customer Champions: Most employees want to serve customers well. When the organization demonstrates that providing exceptional service in an organizational priority, and that the employee are critical to success, then employees will rise to the challenge and amaze you with their commitment to exceed customer expectations.

5. Break through the Barriers to Success: Too many organizations have processes and procedures in place that inadvertently create artificial barriers to successfully serving customers. Procedures and processes are designed with the organization in mind versus the customer and resultant, the customer is unclear or frustrated. Are your sale processes clear to the customer, are your invoices easy to read and understand, do your policies make sense from the customers’ perspective?

6. Measure What Matters: Most organizations have measures in place. Successful organizations have the right measures. Measures that are aligned to their overall vision and that inform them on how they are doing with their ultimate judge of success. Measures of satisfaction, loyalty and intent to repurchase are just as important as profit and how long to answer a call. Successful organization measure and track their performance against their past performance, the customer desires and benchmark against others who are the best at what they do.

7. Lead by Example: Today, top corporate leaders personally put the customer first. They demonstrate their organizations’ vision in the way they lead each day. They believe and invest in people, constantly seek new and better methods, build customer-focused teams and celebrate performance that serves the customer.

I’m not going to pretend that being customer-focused is easy — because it’s not. It requires an absolute dedication to the cause, starting from the top, right on down throughout the organization. But the imperatives are relatively simple.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

Here are 7 critical success factors to providing exceptional customer service.

1. Timeliness: Customers want their questions answered quickly and their problem resolved in a timely manner. Be specific about when something will happen and then make sure it happens.

2. Attitude: Attitude is everything. When customers are treated with respect, courtesy and professionalism they are most receptive to having a satisfactory outcome.

3. Empathy: Having empathy to their situation will usually calm down the most irate customer. Always treat others how we ourselves would like to be treated.

4. Ownership: Take responsibility for the situation. Even if you cannot fix things yourself, make sure the customer doesn’t get bounced around trying to find the right person to help them.

5. Active Listening: Listen first, act second. Only when a customer feels that you have heard what their situation is will they have confidence that you will provide the correct solution. Plus, sometimes we inadvertently leap to an incorrect conclusion on the best solution before we have all the information. This leads to frustrated customers and repeat calls.

6. Expertise: Be knowledgeable about your product or service. If you don’t know the answer — say so, and then quickly get the information from someone who does. Don’t simply pass the customer on to someone else without an introduction.

7. Dependability: When you say you are going to do something, do it. Never leave it up to the customer to follow up. Even if you don’t have a solution, don’t leave the customer hanging with timelines like “as soon as possible”. Make a commitment to respond, even if it is to say “we are still working on it”. Let the customer know what is being done.

Bonus:

8. Follow up: People remember when someone follows up to make sure everything is OK. Many organizations miss this opportunity to turn customers into fans!

The secret to great customer service is not having a perfect product or service — it is resolving each situation to the complete satisfaction of the customer. No one expects perfection — they just want it fixed right and in a timely manner.

If you employ these key success factors, you will build trust and confidence with your customers. And in return, they will give you another opportunity to earn their business.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

The only requirement is you have to see them demonstrating the desired behaviour. If you have followed some of my previous advice and make recognition an ongoing part of your team culture, this technique will fit in extremely well.

You begin by deciding as a team on a symbol to use as a positive cue — a sign you can make to anyone that says, “Well Done!” We are all familiar with “thumbs up” or “OK” circle; universal signals for positive communication. I once heard about a team that decided that when they saw positive behaviours demonstrated they would give each other the finger — a raised index finger for “We’re #1″.

A hand signal does not take the place of verbal or written feedback, but it is a useful addition to one’s toolkit for identifying and acknowledging value added activities. An obvious benefit is that you can do this across a room and no one else even knows what you are doing — something unique to your team or organization.

Your own secret sauce! I know that these tactics seems too simple — but it is inexpensive, personal, relevant, factual, repeatable — and it works Employees want to be acknowledged, to know that the company is aware of their contribution or even more important — their efforts to overcome the limitations of their equipment, unforeseen problems, outdated systems and processes are noticed and appreciated.

People don’t leave companies — they leave Managers. Two of the biggest reasons are; Managers who don’t know how to recognize people effectively, and having to work around poor performing co-workers, bad systems and other problems and not being appreciated and acknowledged.

When your feedback describes what they did and what they had to overcome, you defeat the negative and create a positive, supportive, high performance culture where everyone is working to improve, and where adding value gets noticed.

Try this technique and I guarantee employee engagement will go up and surveys will have positive responses about management and supervision. In addition, turn-over and absenteeism will go down and performance and productivity will go up.

For example I prefer: “That was a great idea you proposed for ……” versus “Your idea was brilliant. You’re very creative.” (Okay, I like that too, but I prefer the former).

You’re probably thinking I am over analyzing and I should take all the positives I can get and shut up. Probably good advice, but I can’t change my emotional response to flattery, praise, or compliments — they make me a bit uncomfortable. I prefer a positive comment about the specific behaviour and its effect. Nobody has to add anything personal or gushy to make me feel good. The behaviour speaks for itself.

For instance: “That comparison you used in the first paragraph really helps the reader understand your point.”

Instead of: “You’re a great writer—so eloquent.” Describing the behaviour and the effect is a particularly good approach if you are just starting to provide positive recognition for behaviours.

It also works with someone you may not have a good relationship with. Anything you say to that individual is going to be hesitantly received — they are sensitized to every phrase, gesture, tone, and inflection. If you have a real good relationship with someone, then you have larger margin for error. Some other examples of positive feedback include:

• When you apologized for the inconvenience to the customer who had to wait in line and thanked them for their patience, which really demonstrated our principle of empathy.
• That recommendation you made about _______ really demonstrated your knowledge about that aspect of the business. It will really save us time.
• Your PowerPoint created a buzz after the meeting. The senior team said your presentation made it easy for them to understand the issue and take action.
• I noticed that your email was sent late last night. I appreciate your commitment and know I can count on the project to be delivered on schedule.

Stay away from describing the person and focus on describing the valued-added behaviour and its effect After you have laid the groundwork based on what they did and what effect it had, then you can add personal appreciation. You can then start you comments with “I appreciated you taking the time to….” You have now added a personal touch based on creating a positive relationship of recognition.

Employees want to be acknowledged, to know that the company is aware of their contribution or even more important — their efforts to overcome the limitations of their equipment, unforeseen problems, outdated systems and processes are noticed and appreciated.

People don’t leave companies — they leave Managers. Two of the biggest reasons are; Managers who doesn’t know how to recognize people effectively, and having to work around poor performing co-workers, bad systems and other problems and not being appreciated and acknowledged.

When your feedback describes what they did and what they had to overcome, you defuse any pent up frustration and create a positive, supportive, high performance culture where everyone is working to improve, and where adding value gets noticed.

Try this technique and I guarantee employee engagement will go up and surveys will have positive responses about management and supervision. In addition, turn-over and absenteeism will go down and performance and productivity will go up.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2009 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

Set a positive tone: It’s easy to blame the economy. Customers are buying less, expecting more. But using the economy as the catch-all excuse for poor performance sends a dangerous message. It implies that the situation is completely out of the company’s hands. This raises anxiety levels and enables complacency. While the competition is bemoaning the economy remember, high achievers never complain, they just get on with it. They look for ways to get a bigger piece of the pie by adding value.

Communicate: An e-mail from the CEO doesn’t accomplish much. Give people frequent opportunities to openly discuss and ask questions about the business situation the company is facing. Speak to employees in small groups and be as candid as possible. Give them what they deserve: honest explanations and plans to move forward. Schedule brown-bag lunches or other informal venues to talk to employees about their findings and where they might be hitting roadblocks. This is also a good time to address any rumours.

Leverage the expertise of your team: Motivate and engage your team by including them in the problem-solving process. Form groups of employees to identify what’s slowing down business. Often the best place to start is to look for processes and bureaucracies that annoy the team. No one knows the issues better than those who are dealing with them daily. It’s a great time for people to realize that they can play an important role in discovering opportunities for the company. (TIP: Cross-pollinate with people who have different areas of expertise. Often fresh eyes offer an innovative new solution.)

Feed your top performers: It’s easy to believe that employees are grateful to have jobs at all. But layoffs and budget cuts cause good people to look for better opportunities. Give them a reason to stay by advancing their careers. If promotions or raises aren’t possible, give top performers the opportunity to grow, even if it’s a lateral move that challenges them in a new way or to take on a special assignment. (TIP: Also, keep an eye out for great talent that other companies have shed for cost cutting measures. This is a great time to recruit future stars.)

Focus on the future: Don’t sugar-coat it! Surviving through the downturn might not be easy, but by emphasizing the opportunities and developing a plan together you will emerge even stronger than before.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

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