Article Review on Manage your Human Sigma
- John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman, and James K. Harter)
By:
Anusha Avire (2T3-05)
G. Sai Sowjanya (2T3-17)
About the Authors
John H. Fleming, Ph.D.:
Is a Principal of Gallup and Chief Scientist for Gallup's
Customer Engagement and Human Sigma practices.
Fleming is a coauthor of the Harvard Business Review article
"Manage Your Human Sigma.“
About the Authors
Curt Coffman
• A New York Times Bestselling Author, researcher, business
scientist, consultant to the University of Denver, Fortune
100 and 500 organizations, MBA and Executive Fellow at
the Daniels School of Business, Curt Coffman has invested
30+ years in the science of high performance cultures.
About the Authors
James K. Harter, Ph.D.
Is chief scientist, workplace management and well-being, for
Gallup’s workplace management practice.
His research has been reported in several business bestsellers and
in academic articles, book chapters, and publications such as USA
Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.
He is co-author of the New York Times bestseller 12: The
Elements of Great Managing, an exploration of the 12 crucial
ingredients for creating and harnessing employee engagement.
For Measuring And Managing Interactions
Between Customers And Employees:
Emotions-judgments and behavior are more powerful.
Measured and managed locally
It’s possible to arrive at a single measure of effectiveness; this
measure has a high correlation with financial performance.
Organizations must conduct both short-term, transactional
interventions and long-term, transformational ones.
Emotions Frame The Encounter
• Six Sigma processes are data driven, rational, and analytic.
• Widespread use of Six Sigma and TQM methodologies has resulted
in vastly improved product quality over the past two decades.
• Inspired by these improvements, businesses have tried to apply Six
Sigma principles in sales and service settings.
• But nothing human is ever that simple. People may think that their
behavior is purely rational, but it rarely is.
Twenty years of research in two very different fields—neuroscience
and behavioral economics—has established quite clearly that people
base their decisions on a complicated mixture of emotion and reason.
Indeed, recent work suggests that emotions may play a larger role than
analysis.
Emotions Frame The Encounter
Customer Engagement.
• Clearly, a Six Sigma approach to measuring and managing the
quality of the employee-customer interaction needs to take
customers’ emotions into account.
• Measures of customer engagement:
1. The first dimension it looks at is confidence
2. The second is integrity.
3. The next element is pride
4. The fourth dimension is passion
Fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium over the average
customer in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and
relationship growth.
Emotions Frame The Encounter
Employee Engagement.
• Every interaction an employee has with a customer represents an
opportunity to build that customer’s emotional connection—or to
diminish it.
Emotions Frame The Encounter
Employee Engagement.
• Performance metrics that acknowledge the importance of emotional
engagement—on the part of both customers and employees—
provide much stronger links to desired financial and operational
outcomes.
• But deciding which metrics to use is just the first step toward
effective management of the employee-customer encounter.
• Deciding how to deploy them is equally important.
• Unfortunately, in many companies, metrics designed with the right
intentions are often deployed in the wrong ways.
The Encounter Must Be Measured Locally
• Local variability shows up on virtually every performance metric
they have examined.
• For sales and service organizations, unmanaged variability in the
quality of the customer experience represents a significant threat to
the enterprise’s sustainability, because customers experience
variation, not averages.
• The only way to improve local performance is to provide feedback
at the level where the variability originates.
• When the employee-customer encounter is assessed at the level of
the local work group, executives can learn a lot about organizational
performance.
• Local performance variation is the scourge of organizations that
aspire to high performance.
The Encounter Must Be Measured Locally
• Unfortunately, in most organizations, variability in the effectiveness of
the employee-customer encounter goes largely undiagnosed. As a
result, revenues and profits are bled off, and growth is anemic.
• The factors that are common across the enterprise—product, price,
processes, policies, and so forth—can’t, by definition, explain local
variability (they often play a critical role in driving customer
engagement, of course).
• If these factors don’t differ from place to place, the only remaining
culprit is the way those processes and policies are implemented locally.
• To reduce variability in the customer experience, businesses must focus
on reducing variability in local “people” processes (the “who” and
“how” of implementation).
• The power of a local focus on reducing variability lies in its simplicity
and flexibility. Each unit can identify and correct its own problems.
The Link to Financial Vitality
• Human sigma Employee + Customer Engagement=single
measurement
• A survey was conducted, they identified ten top performing
stores.
• There’s assumption was wrong regarding their survey. Only
one store appeared in the top list following customer and
employee engagement.
• $32 million in additional annual profits for the entire chain.
Two levels are in need for improvement.
• Those who engage employees without engaging customers.
• Those who engage customers without engaging employees.
Top three levels are to be optimized: localperformance variability should be reduced andoverall performance should be increased.
HOW TO GET THERE
How to manage and reduce variability at the local level,
here are the three quick points:
• Responsibility for human sigma must be centralized.
• Local manager is important factor in local group
performance
• Some companies need to overhaul their HR practices
Responsibility for human sigma must
be centralized
• Data about customers: Marketing team
• Data regarding employees: HR team
• Data regarding finance: Finance Team
• Should be measured and monitored by an executive who as
an authority to initiate and manage change.
Employee-
customer
encounter
can be drawn
Local manager is important factor in local group
performance
• Foster employees learning or stave them.
• Should use familiar tools for improvement of performance
of the employees.
• If none effects the performance managers should be
replaced.
Some companies need to overhaul their HR
practices
• Transformational interventions may be necessary.
• If human sigma numbers are lower than expected then
broader intervention should be needed.