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On-Boarding Is A Massive Problem Everywhere!
CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture
Remote On-Boarding. It is a massive problem, everywhere
Is your company having a problem with OnBoarding Remote Employees? Companies are losing every hire they have made this year in less than 30 days because of their On-Boarding experience.
Oftentimes, effective on-boarding involves getting-to-know you activities and training from coworkers. These efforts give new employees an opportunity to develop relationships that help them feel more embraced and connected. We are finding companies are not able to retain employees because they don’t feel integrated into their company culture.
On-Boarding Stages and Activities
We have three distinct stages in the employee on-boarding journey: Pre-OnBoarding, OnBoarding and Post-OnBoarding, each demonstrating an employee experience that keeps them from exiting the company. These three stages allow for new hires to become active participants in their on-boarding process and acclimate to the social and professional expectations of their new work environment so that they can proceed comfortably and effectively in their roles.
As more companies choose to hire remote workers, they face the challenge of creating an on-boarding process that accomplishes this goal for their virtual employees. CultureSparq is helping companies re-imagine their on-boarding process to attract and retain talent.
In this post, we want to share several ways to get you started and have fun doing it.
Take a look at these 7 activities for On-Boarding remote employees
Face-to-Face Connection: Get all new hires on a video call and create social distancing activities to get people outside to participate in a team event so new employees can feel that energy of connectivity (i.e., Neighborhood Cleanup campaign, Feeding the homeless or Renovating a School in the community or an Ice breaker with food in the park). This is important because people perform better when they know each other.
Digital Workspace: Get employees online quickly by having a digital workspace with the all access to tools and other apps to help them become familiar with the flow of the team deliverables and how things are communicated.
Culture Handbook. Build The Culture. Provide a digital employee handbook on the company historical milestones from a culture perspective. People want to be part of something big that inspires them to overcome challenges. Share insights about the company and on other employees experiences by having leaders across the organization record a short video on their experience, achievements and purpose with the company will help new employees feel they are a part of something bigger than them.
Create a sense of belonging. Due to the isolation of working remotely, it can often lead people to have this imposter syndrome and feeling of loneliness. We suggest hiring Employee Success Managers who work with new hires and teams by serving as a transformational/life coach to help remote employees navigate and get familiar with the company. These Employee Success Managers are experts in organizational and personal development. Their primary focus is to transform business structures by working closely with new employees to achieve their own personal goals in first 90 -120 days.
Check-Ins: Provide an individualized remote on-boarding plan with fun video check-ins and goals. If your company wants to make remote work work, then you need to embrace many modes of communication but more so around video experiences. As remote employees are spread across different time zones, a bigger portion of your company’s internal communication will be asynchronous–with employees reading email, chat messages and Slack updates anywhere from minutes to hours after they are originally sent — Video checkins are great ways to have fun and take a break from that mode of checking in by allowing people to create cool video message to communicate on their progress.
Accountability: Initiate professional development and personal growth from the start. Expect them to take initiative and seek ways they can level-up and be accountable for their responsibilities.
Encourage collaborative learning. Have new employees work as a group to complete a proof-of-concept or project during on-boarding to get them to bond with each other— this introduces team members personalities and skills along with providing an opportunity to cross-train teams early on.
Remember
Make your objective to create experiences in which remote employees feel as assimilated and supported as traditional in-office employees. This will take some experimentation along with some careful hiring and an open mind. If you don’t get it exactly right the first time, gather feedback to make an adjustment and try, try again! Or give us a call.
If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.
We Build The Culture.
Digital Transformation Success Metrics
CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture
What are your Digital Transformation KPIs?
As one CEO whispered to me while everyone began entering the room, “wait and see, once we get to our corporate KPIs managers will start looking for the exits.”
No CEO doubts the importance of measuring their company’s performance properly. Yet the executive teams we’ve assisted over more than 10 years generally struggle to engage with the challenge.
What Are You Really Measuring?
Executing your digital transformation initiative will be a major undertaking even if you have the most experienced leadership team. The work begins with your team creating meaningful KPIs to make your transformation experience ROI justified.
At CultureSparq, we take KPIs personal because we know measuring digital transformation progress is a challenge and many companies avoid monitoring it altogether.
The Gartner team found, almost half of all organizations have no metric in place to measure digital transformation. This is due to the fact that many companies get caught up in the excitement of launching a groundbreaking digital transformation initiative missing out on the opportunity to measure what really matters like KPIs.
We want you to Choose the right digital measures of success to help you achieve the expected business outcomes. So we decided to share some metrics to keep you focus on measuring progress and help you make that shift from using operational efficiency metrics to measures that interest executive decision makers. We encourage you to level set by knowing how to use metrics with a purpose.
For example be sure to list what you are trying to achieve by doing the following:
Have a clearly defined and defensible causal relationship to a business outcome
Work as a leading, not lagging, indicator
Address a specific, defined audience
They can be understood by a non-IT audience
Drive action when they change from green to yellow to red.
Once you aligned your team you can start thinking what metrics you want to use to measure success. Here are a few KPIs you can explore to measure your digital transformation progress.
Digital Proficiency from percentage of the marketing spend that is digital to your Brand value in the market
Customer Focus such as the percentage increase in customer engagement in digital channels and the reduction in time to market new products to customers
Return on Transformation like your Percentage of revenue from new products/services introduced due to the digital initiative and the number of new products or services launched in the market and being consumed.
Be sure to keep things simple, start with 2-3 metrics so you can pivot-or-persevere in a meaningful way.
Just know, a lack of urgency is the greatest obstacle businesses face when considering the value of digital transformation. Proper planning is important but, more than that, the execution as per the KPIs you select is what take you through the journey.
Leading a digital transformation calls for an entirely new mindset on the way you do business. We are helping companies make that transformation leap.
If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.
We Build The Culture
Reimagining Your Digital Transformation Journey?
Here’s what you need to know before you reimagine your digital transformation journey
From an industry wide perspective, you will need to learn and track how digital technology will deliver the next change in business impact.
Then start with a core mission so you can begin aligning leaders of influence around it to understand the social impact-value you’re trying to deliver.
Don’t be fooled by the word ‘digital’ in ‘digital transformation’ - this is a Culture change process at its heart. Leaders of all types will need to have a role to play in delivering digital transformation, but the challenge is getting more inspirational change-makers with a high emotional-IQ at the top to help guide the Digital Transformation Journey through the next few years of change. Getting your Digital Culture established will be key to your success.
As you explore the landscape of how to build the digital culture needed to thrive in this new reality — let’s put a few things in context from a data perspective.
61% of Companies will likely hire talent with skills relevant to new technologies
54% of Organizations believe that a digital talent gap is hampering their transformation initiatives
51% of Organizations state that they lack talent who possess digital transformation skills
78% of Companies believe that they lack the capabilities to manage digital transformation
Here are some some areas you should reimagine prior to kicking off your Digital Transformation Journey.
The New Digital Culture
Digital business models and strategies
Marketing in a digital world
Customer insights
Customer journey in a digital world
Data analytics
Design thinking
Digital operations
Digital Tools
Workflow Automation
Cloud Migration
Robotic Process Automation
CultureSparq is helping companies build their capabilities to understand the business impact of Culture, Data and Technology to apply frameworks for value creation and innovation that lead customer success initiatives for a sustainable competitive advantage.
We are transforming businesses back into high impact startups — from shrinking the complexity, being nimble, innovative and building a Customer obsessed culture.
Go to CultureSparq to signup for your Digital Transformation workshop today.
Or If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.
We Build The Culture!
CEO Talk: Power Equals Play
If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.
The Big Ten: Competitive Business Strategies
What is Strategy?
Simply put, strategy is the way in which you plan on matching what you do best with the customers you plan to reach.
At CultureSparq, we believe team work is the most essential factor to winning the strategy game. Creating an environment for teams to immerse themselves in a collaborative culture of getting business done is a good start. Plus having diverse opinions should be encouraged especially when the population of the workforce and customers are increasingly shifting.
Competition
As a leader it will be important for you to create a competitive synergy where each team member can learn different ways to compete at becoming better assets to the organization.
Mobilizing a winning culture requires a level of precision which can only be achieved when your leaders are pushing the same strategy across the organization while promoting teams to achieve its desired results in an unpredictable environment.
Contrary to what "everybody knows," strategy is not about achieving results in a known and foreseeable environment, but in an environment that is unknown and unforeseeable. So it’s best to have a team with a high emotional IQ and the skills to deliver your strategy.
To position your strategy to win for you and your customers — we want to share some key principles you should consider in developing your strategy
Key Principles
1. Commit Fully to a Definite Objective
The objective must be precisely defined, and you must commit fully to it. This commitment is not only important for yourself, it is important to gain and maintain the commitment of those you lead.
2. Seize the Initiative and Keep It
You must get the initiative and keep it until you achieve your goal. Don’t emphasized on theory, or even planning, but more on action. It’s not enough to have a great idea you must take action on it for it to mean anything.
3. Economize to Mass Your Resources
You can’t be strong everywhere because your resources will always be limited. Consider time. The idea is to economize where your efforts and resources are not critical and concentrate them where they are more important.
4. Use Strategic Positioning
To achieve any strategic objective, you will need to be agile due to environmental or other unexpected changes. You may need to modify your approach and positioning, even as you continue to work toward an objective.
5. Do the Unexpected
When you have competition, it is most effective to surprise your competition and do the unexpected. This principle can also be profitably applied with customers and prospects, so long as the surprise is pleasant.
6. Keep Things Simple
The more things that can go wrong, the more will go wrong. If you want less to go wrong, keep your strategy simple where fewer things can go wrong.
7. Prepare Multiple Simultaneous Alternatives
Since some actions inspired by your thinking are going to fail, you should always have an alternative action, even an alternative intermediate objective thought through and ready to be implemented.
8. Take the Indirect Route to Your Objective
Moving directly against any human thought or endeavor always arouses opposition. People hold on all the more strongly to their previously held notions. So moving indirectly, perhaps using an incentive desired by those you want to persuade or influence can work well.
9. Practice Timing and Sequencing
There is a time for every purpose. Implementing the “right” strategy at the wrong time or in the wrong sequence can be just as ineffective as if the strategy was all wrong.
10. Exploit Your Success
Don’t stop or slow down when you are winning and achieving your objectives. Not staying continually ahead of your competition is simply giving your competition another chance to stop you.
We Build The Culture to give your customers a better experience. CultureSparq can help you get started.
Let’s get on a call.
Are Your Customers Leaving?
CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture
Why You Need Customer Success
WHAT IS CUSTOMER SUCCESS?
Simply put, it’s a business strategy ensuring customers achieve success, their desired outcomes while using your product or service.
If you are an executive looking to boost revenues or a sales rep looking to give your customers a better experience so they can become loyal customers — this quick read is for you.
KEY ROLE
Customer Success Managers are critical to your business success. They will work to improve customer happiness and loyalty by helping customers succeed. We suggest your Customer Success Managers tie their objectives directly to your bottom line by measuring the outcomes and hold them accountable for reducing churn rates, improving renewal and customer satisfaction.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
We need to understand the benefits of what “Customer Success ”does for your business. Customer success has the power to help you grow your base of advocates and promoters. Customer success is linked directly to your customer satisfaction and when your customers are thriving, everyone wins.
How do you get this done. We do this by focusing the customer journey by giving a remarkable or memorable experience. We believe this is best done by building a customer lifecycle structure using these three stages — Pre-Purchase, Purchase and Post-Purchase which we will cover in another post.
This type of structure allows you to not just focus on customer acquisition but also on retention - an area most companies spend little time doing. The Customer Experience includes all aspects of the customer journey, from the moment they first become familiar with your company and its products through the actual sale and beyond.
One way to be effective in this structure is to establish your objective and key metrics to learn where you can increase customer success. Let’s take a look at a few areas to keep from losing your customers.
3 KEY AREAS
To begin building your customer success framework, we encourage you to set three key metrics to get customer data to measure your success throughout each stage.
Customer Health Score, this can help you determine if customers actually seeing value from your product or service.
Customer Churn Rate, this is great metric to measure if your Customer Success Managers are maintaining a healthy relationship with each of their clients.
Customer Satisfaction Score, this will give your business a high-level idea of how customers feel after completing an interaction with the Customer Success team.
Implementing these three metrics for increasing customer success can proactively lead to better retention rates and greater customer experience. Keep in mind, to create the most impact, an effective customer success management structure will be base on customer data.
We Build The Culture to mobilize your customer success team to thrive at giving your customers a better experience with your products/services and brand. CultureSparq can help you get started. Don’t lose another customer - reach out today to learn how.
Let’s get on a call. Schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.