Launching our services in the UK

Hi all,

It has again been a while since the blog was tended too. Life gets busy as you can imagine and the blog has fallen by the wayside. If anyone is still out there, be of good cheer we are back, and will be posting thoughts and ideas on a more regular basis. A few things have changed though and here they are:

We are launching our services in the UK. We still support New Zealand customers but we are looking to go global.

We have partnered with Staffey to provide high value, high quality outsourcing solutions. Visit www.staffey.com for more details on their great service delivery.

We are horrified more than ever at the poor customer service so many companies now provide. It is going to be our goal to expose poor customer service & celebrate great customer service. Whether this is provided internally or outsourced.

Keep an eye out on things, we are still here, and still going strong.

Latest Hays salary survey for Australia & New Zealand

The 2008 survey is out. I find their report quite comprehensive while being easy and simple at the same time.

A great resource for employers and employees alike.

Record low unemployment in New Zealand

The pinch for employers is growing by the month or so it appears. With record unemployment levels hitting 3.4% in the month of December. Why is this happening? Why is it that so many employers from every industry finding the employee resource so thin?

The answer I believe is simple. Because many families can no longer survive on a single income, the mother also has to go out to work. This is substantially increasing the number of people in the workforce. Wages no longer cover standard living in New Zealand. This is also why so many New Zealander’s are heading across to Australia.

Further proof of the idea that wages are no longer matching costs is a rare comment by the Finance Minister Michael Cullen. Stating to the effect that employers should review wages. Along with talks of tax cuts (No surprises why that is being discussed).

Anyway the guts of all this is that …
1) More people are going to continue to move to Australia (the grass is always greener on the other side right).

2) Wages will go up as the high skilled demand more from their employers or leave for better conditions (supply and demand).

3) As a result of higher wages, prices will rise (got to cover the costs of delivering the product or service)

4) Inflation will go up and hopefully tax will come down (if we are lucky).

5) More families will feel the pinch and the need to send the “Mum” out to work just to make ends meet (this is the saddest part of the whole scenario)

How not to deliver the”you are now redundant” message

This article in computerworld I think is a good example on how not to manage the whole process of outsourcing and the following redundancy that will inevitably take place. Apparently these people were told by video link even though senior management staff were in the building. The story portrays a really badly managed process.

It isn’t just the final video link announcement that was off colour, but also the lies and sneaky back handling that appears to have gone on well before the final blow. There are obviously things that are sensitive to an industry or company that cannot be talked about. But in general even if outsourcing is seriously on the cards you still want to maintain a good will with your employees.

This article highlights very clearly the delicate nature of the outsourcing beast. All care should be taken. You never know what can happen if you manage the transition badly. Someone may blog or write about you.

A bad rap for the company Humanware. And good luck to their employees.

Personality Employment

One thing that many employers are caught by is what I call personality employment. This is where an employee looks good on paper and do fantastically in the interview. They come across as charming and onto it and willing to learn.

Yet when they arrive and settle into the job the employer goes “Woops that was a mistake” they may be lazy or not up to the job. Maybe they just don’t have a personality that gets on well with the rest of the team or just don’t fit the company environment well.

Unfortunately it is pretty hard to remove these personality employees. It isn’t even a great thing for them and I often wonder what drives people to apply for and smooth talk themselves into positions they just can’t handle.

The bigger question (and I don’t have an answer) is how do you identify these clowns before they become a part of your show. Lots of recruitment agency’s provide you with personality profiles, and say they can’t be faked. Well I am afraid while you may not be able to be the reverse of your personality, you can sku the results in your favour for particular positions.

One of the things I can suggest is gut instinct. Everyone you meet over the first 30 minutes you get an impression of that person. This impression may not be 100% accurate, but it is a good judgement system you can rely on. It is almost like a fight or flight impulse that is programmed in from birth.

If your instinct has warning signals popping up, even if the person appears great. It is worth a bit of exploration.

An employees family is part of the package

It was my 3rd Wedding Anniversary the other day which was great for us. I don’t know why but the 3rd anniversary feels like a bit of a milestone to me. Anyway apart from it being a great day it got me thinking about a post from a week back about employees needing more than money from a company.

I realised as my wife and I reviewed the last three years that wouldn’t it be great if my job wasn’t just about me but about my whole family. I mean why do I work except to provide for my family right. I started thinking about this as an employer. Because if you can get the family of employees on board as well as the employee the relationship with your organisation goes beyond just one person, but you get buy in from the whole family.

So what can we do to build buy in from the employees family. Here are some thoughts.

If you have a meeting room with a projector, have monthly kids movie nights. Get all the kids from all the employees to come along.

Have special thank you gifts for the spouses on their birthday’s, anniversary’s or Christmas. Thank them for sharing the Husband or Wife with your company.

Have a BBQ or party for no reason what so ever. Just get the families of employees knowing each other.

Ring up the spouses and do a survey with the spouses on what things the company can improve on. (You may or may not be surprised how much a spouse knows about, especially the bad bits).

I am sure there are tons of ways you can get the families of your employees involved. Build them into your winning team. Many people with families want stability. This idea goes along way to building stability, but also making the whole family on board with the Husband or Wife working for that company.

How much would it cost if you left?

We are back after a great Easter break. I have to admit I haven’t done much business thinking at all during the few days off. It has mostly been relaxing. Anyway onto the topic on my mind today, the cost of a lost employee.

I wonder if anyone can put a dollar onto the value of lost information a dedicated hardworking employee takes with them when they leave. When a customer leaves you loose dollars, that is fairly obvious. Less obvious is that cost a company wears when a good employee leaves.

It is the information locked away inside the person and the relationships they have with the customer. Not only that but you have to replace them, hire someone new and train them. They may be the best in their industry but they bring baggage onboard with you. It takes reconditioning at times to “your way of doing things”.

Add to these costs the fact that some of your best employees are what is holding your customers loyalty. With them leaving the relationship can become very fragile indeed. Finally you also have the prospect of all that wealth of information, knowledge and understanding going to a competitor or in their own start up.

When you dig deep into the whole cost involved when you loose a valuable employee it can get quite scary.

Customer loyalty – Is it to the company or the person?

An interesting thought came to my mind as I was on the phone to someone just now. They indicated that they had a guy that looks after their IT, he was great. That isn’t the interesting bit the interesting bit was that this guy used to work for the company that did their IT work prior to him looking after them independently.

It prompted the thought about customer loyalty. In the IT industry & no doubt many other service industries where does the loyalty lie? I have bumped into several companies with the same story as this one I just talked to. All of them went with the individual when the choice arose rather than sticking with the company.

If the person is good and the relationship of trust has been developed, why not. Even though you are contracting a company to do the work, ultimately the relationship lies with the person right. In each occasion that I have come across the individual has left for several reasons. Company was sold, the company management changed and the culture changed, or simply they were ready to make it alone and felt they could sway some of the people they do work for to follow.

It prompts another question, how does a company build the relationship alongside the individual so that if this choice ever does arise, the company is the one that the customer sticks with.

If you outsource, make sure you outsource the right skills

One of the challenges people face when they start down the road of outsourcing is what to outsource. It is essential that you only outsource jobs and skills that are easily duplicated. I call them the process skills. They are skills that can be learnt and taught to others.

Intellect skills are those that intellectual property and real value in service delivery come from. They are not easy to duplicate, they are where your real value lies. These intellect skills are the ones that build customer relationships and confidence. These are the skills that create differential between you and your competitors.

There are literally thousands of programmers around the globe programming. If you look at most industries around the IT you will find often many similar offerings. The process skills behind them are all the same. It could be a .net developer in America, China, Philippines or England. The language is the same.

Of course there are people with better process skills than others. Some are truly genius. But the process skill is just a means to an end. The intellect skill is the beginning and the end.

Employee exit interviews

So a critical staff member has announced they are leaving. I suppose the first thing might be to panic. If you have a high staff turn over I suppose it will feel pretty normal. Apart from finding another employee to replace the person leaving you may also want to find out why.

If you talk to your employees about their reasons, and you can get them to actually tell the truth (a hard part of the process) then it can arm you with more information so that you can retain other staff instead of loosing them.

One company I talked to recently did just this and the employee was upfront in saying it was the IT infrastructure, the crashes and slowness drove him crazy. That was the main reason for his leaving. If they had found this out prior to his leaving it would have been a relatively easy thing to solve. Far less expensive than loosing one of your best employees.

Mercer HR provides a good document on their website about some of the reasons why an exit interview is important. You can find it here. For me it is finding out what they didn’t like. Why is now the reason for leaving. Often it could be the leadership style. Other times it could be that they have lost faith in the product or service. Or it could be because they were poached from you by a competitor or better offer.

The more information you can get the better you can make it for the rest of the staff. Retaining good employees is critical to a successful business.