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The Five Factors

Infusing your organization with more humanity isn’t as simple as following a recipe. There’s no easy step-by-step solution that you can implement. Rather, increasing what we call the TOUCH factor in all areas of your operations is an evolving process, measured with softer metrics than some leaders are comfortable with. After all, KPI (key performance indicators) dashboards don’t often measure the soft stuff.

Based on our own experiences and conversations with countless business and community leaders, we’ve identified five overall factors which are key to growing and leading a human-based organization. As you’ll see, they’re not tactical steps to check off a list. Rather, they’re an overall ethos that must become a part of your organizational commitment to human values.

We’ll spend just a bit of time on these five factors, then spend the rest of the book discussing how you can instill these values in all aspects of your organization.

Technology

It might seem counterintuitive to put technology at the top of the list of factors necessary to humanize your organization. The fact is, technology can be your strongest ally. There are thousands of web services, software as a service (SaaS) products, and digital tools which can help you inflect more humanity into the mix.

Let’s start with some important guideposts.

Hire Your Technology

Stop thinking about your technology as nothing more than a computer. You should treat your business technology as you would an actual human employee. Have a job description for which a technological solution may apply. Then, conduct regular performance reviews (luckily, your technology won’t ask for a pension).

 Does the technology that serves your organization still do as good a job now as when you first brought it on board?

 Is it taking too many sick days (downtime)?

 Do you have a growth and succession plan in place for when you exceed its capabilities?

In far too many cases, the answer to these questions is either “No” or “I have no idea.”

We’re not talking about a general sense of these items either. Schedule annual performance reviews of your CRM (customer relationship management) system. Invite the people who work closest with it. Ask them to submit reviews of the system’s job performance over the past year. Ask these colleagues of the technology to advise on when it needs to be promoted (more money invested in it) or fired.

This regular performance review (call it a “tech audit” if you’re uncomfortable with the human language) is critical because your business grows, your stakeholders change over time, and your objectives shift. Your business technology should evolve with these changes.

Work Backwards

The first technology decisions that contribute to the dehumanizing of organizations often come from forcing your people or customers to adapt to your technology and not the other way around.

You’ve probably been on the receiving end of this. At one time you and your outsourced designer were just fine sending emails back and forth. In an effort to achieve greater efficiency, she brought on a complicated project management website. Now, you have to make sure you’re emailing the right Dropbox address, you’re not sure which members of the team are receiving your replies, and you can’t view attachments without logging into the new platform. Hell, where did you put that password, anyway?

To align your business technology with the humans you serve and lead, you must start with the customer or employee experience and work backwards to the technology.

Steve Jobs said it best:

You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it, and I know that it’s the case. As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?’ [It’s] not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how are we going to market that?’[1]

Anticipate, Don’t React

Here’s one reason the robot overlords haven’t seized control of Earth yet — we humans have instinct, gut feelings, and the ability to anticipate needs with greater accuracy than machines. (Though this is a close race — IBM’s Jeopardy-playing robot, Watson, was able to predict when it was likely to get an answer wrong. In one question under the category “U.S. Cities,” Watson guessed “Toronto?????” — complete with the five question marks. Because Watson was able to doubt the strength of the answer, the computer bet only a fraction of its money pool, prompting host Alex Trebek to shout, “Oh, you sneak!”)

Remember there are many human-centric steps in any decision cycle, whether it’s a purchase decision, hiring decision, or management decision. Steps like “consideration” are often ignored by technology platforms. Instead, we get marketing automation tools which merely keep bugging people until they buy something.

Some companies are working toward anticipating purchases before customers even commit to buying. A recent patent filed by Amazon reveals its plan for “anticipatory package shipping.” Amazon’s system identifies near-purchases (like the act of placing items in a digital cart, adding items to a wish list, or even long cursor hovers over specific items listed on its website) and begins the process of shipping based on that behaviour. Packages are sent to shipping hubs or directly to trucks in anticipation of the Purchase button being clicked. This would let Amazon ship copies of a popular book on the day it’s published, for example. To reduce the number of returns, Amazon says it might offer a steep discount to deliver the product anyway or, if it’s a low-cost item, provide it as a thank-you gift. It’s a simple tactic, yet one which makes the company more connected to the real-world day of its customers.

On the human resources side, being able to forecast issues through surveys or by simply tracking them on a calendar can alert you to needs which are likely to arise.

In your customer service department, you should be using tools that let you monitor social chatter which may turn into issues you’re forced to deal with. For larger brands, this can be as simple as monitoring mentions of your brand or product names online alongside a list of hot words like “broken,” “missing,” or “lousy,” and popping in with a gentle “Can I be of service?” message. Follow-through is critical.

In public relations and public affairs, resources should be dedicated to monitoring public opinion online, measuring reaction to campaigns, issues, and activities. Proactive research and sentiment analysis will allow you to anticipate changes in opinion and better equip you to change course and communicate effectively before an issue takes on a life of its own — a life in which you have little or no part.

Outcomes

You’ve probably felt it before — the dread of year-end measurement against the same key performance indicators (KPIs). These indicators, like cost per acquisition, customer attrition rate, and bad debt recovery, are important to guide your organization to success.

Far too often, leaders mistakenly direct their focus on measuring hard numbers, often drowning in data without understanding how their activities impact real humans.

Breathing more humanity into these outcomes — and even providing some softer, yet measurable, metrics — will go a long way.

Why, Not What

Human organizations must articulate the sole purpose they have for existing. Reducing customer attrition may indeed be a compelling objective, but it doesn’t define why you do what you do. Each leader should be able to articulate to their team why the organization exists in the first place.

Consider the vision of Vancity, the largest English-language credit union in Canada. It’s clear: “At Vancity, our vision is to redefine wealth.”

Their vision statement continues, explaining that the organization feels it needs to “re-envision prosperity as something we can only achieve if we are surrounded by and connected to a vibrant, healthy community that is sustainable for the long term.”

It’s a welcome change from the usual vision of outcomes like increasing shareholder value. Ask the benefit that humans gain from increasing shareholder value. Can they afford better things for their kids? How does it improve their day-to-day life? How will it change how they view the world?

Your first step is to understand and explain the human reasons you do something. Only then can you measure your success in that space.

Simple, Human KPIs

We need a new model of measuring success in organizations — one that understands the effect your operations have on real people.

As with each of the five factors outlined in this book, this new look at business can and should cross each of your departments.

One approach we like is business advisor and strategist Chris Brogan’s annual exercise in selecting three words which guide his priorities in each upcoming year. His 2014 focus words are:

Lifestyle — I’m using this to cover my fitness/health efforts, my financial health, my choices in how I spend my time. It’s a big one covering much more than the word usually covers.

Monchu — The network is everything. I’m committed to doing even more for the people I serve in 2014. This is a huge focus for me, my business, my speeches, my pursuits. Oh wait, maybe you don’t know what the word Monchu means. “Monchu” is an Okinawan word that means “one family” or sometimes “extended family” or sometimes “the family we choose.”

Black — As in “get in the black.” I don’t mean my finances (though I’ll be working on financial strengthening this coming year), but also my life choices, my ability to build the marketplace to achieve what I can help it accomplish. I mean to invest in my world and grow my capabilities. The general feeling when I say this word in my own head is “all is right with the world.” That’s the goal.

You can read more about Chris’s words strategy at http://touchthebook.com/3words.

Chris’s words centre on his personal growth.

Your organization could adopt the same approach and clarify your overall outcomes with three simple words. These act like mantras across your firm, focusing your teams on the human impact of your business. Should you decide to employ this idea, be sure you have a clear understanding of how you’ll measure growth toward these word themes.

For instance, if one word is listen, determine metrics for ensuring your organization is picking up the subtleties of conversation around and throughout your business, using social media monitoring tools, proactive surveying, informal employee town hall meetings, and conversations — formal and informal — wherever they may occur.

Dan Heath, coauthor of several books including Made to Stick, demonstrates the danger of creating mission statements by committee in the FastCompany video How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck.”[2] In it, Dan walks through an example of a great mission statement employees can understand and get behind becoming increasingly meaningless as a committee softens word choice and each participant makes sure his or her own purpose is cemented into the corporate mission.

Former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki laments the amount of his life wasted in mission-setting meetings with dozens of senior leaders. He offers a compelling alternative: a mantra.

A mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.

If I were the CEO of Wendy’s, I would establish a corporate mantra of “healthy fast food.” End of story.

Some other examples of corporate mantras:

 Federal Express: “Peace of mind”

 Nike: “Authentic athletic performance”

 Target: “Democratize design”

 Mary Kay: “Enriching women’s lives”

Dan Pontefract, author of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization and head of the Telus department overseeing cultural change in the organization, agrees. “When you are going through an organizational change, your organization needs a mantra and I think you as an individual need one.”

“At Telus, we adopted the mantra “Culture is our competitive advantage.”

It must be working. In the summer of 2007, employee engagement at Telus was 53 percent. Today, it is 83 percent.

Disclosure

But it’s not enough to decide on and communicate these additional KPIs and ultra-short mission statements. For progress toward your organization’s outcomes to be clearly understood by people in the trenches, you need to make sure evidence of progress is clear.

Vancouver digital marketing firm 6S Marketing uses computer screens in its office, displaying real-time metrics like sales targets and public social media mentions to team members. They use salesforce-based software called Hoopla, which “jazzes up” metrics as a kind of running game — including a top-sales-performer scoreboard, complete with virtual awards and a gong sound that plays when a sale is closed. (See touchthebook.com/hoopla for more information on how 6S uses this system.)

Of course, disclosure doesn’t need to have such a highly ratcheted-up cool factor. Something as simple as an internal magazine (physical or digital) that highlights progress toward metrics can suffice. Don’t limit this information to your senior executives and shareholders; sharing it with your people will help increase morale and prove that progress is being made toward clear goals.

Uniqueness

Too many organizations rely on the same customer service responses, the same benefits programs, and the same procedures. There’s nothing wrong with studying and using best practices in your business. Still, to become a more human organization you need to stand above the crowd in all aspects of your business.

In their 1990 book Creating the Service Culture: Strategies for Canadian Business, authors Stanley A. Brown, Marvin B. Martenfeld, and Allan Gould suggest that, at some point, all business offerings will become essentially homogeneous. When that happens, they hypothesize success will be defined less by a product or service itself and more by the experience of the buyer and end-user. Product similarities are the subject of many a patent lawsuit these days. Like in Hollywood, where a studio’s gamble on a penguin movie spawns an entire genre of penguin movies, tech titans and start-ups that launch innovative products spawn entire categories — blue oceans which quickly become bloody red waters of competition.

When innovation winds down, revenues dry up.

Perhaps this explains the emergence of companies with a mission to collect patents and protect them through lawsuits.

Product innovation takes a lot of capital investment. It takes research, development, user interface considerations, quality assurance testing, creative marketing efforts, and is subject to safety standards and other regulatory restrictions. It’s a complex process. And, because these stages have been widely accepted for many years, they’re largely relied upon as the proven process.

The original Star Wars movie was acclaimed for its groundbreaking special effects. But it wasn’t a blockbuster hit because director George Lucas invested heavily in developing new special effects technology to tell his story. As Danny Brown, coauthor of Influence Marketing, pointed out in his TEDxOttawa talk,[3] Star Wars was the highest-grossing film for six years because it was a human-relatable story of overcoming the odds set in gritty conditions, “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” and was released at a time when the sci-fi genre was about the pristine technology of the future. The prequel, released twenty-two years later, was a marvel of special effects technology with an extremely weak story by comparison; all tech, no TOUCH.

Being human should be natural to all of us. After all, we are human. However, we’re often conditioned to suppress our emotions and present a brave, optimistic, and successful face. We’re often taught failure is not an option. For some reason, apologies have become synonymous with admitting negligence (apologies are covered in more detail in the chapter about leadership).

Dealing with suffering is neither unique nor unusual. The death of a parent is unavoidable. However, we often pretend this type of reality doesn’t exist. That’s why the public is bowled over when politicians, CEOs, and community leaders declare their humanity by tweeting an apology for some misdeed, or publishing a blog post about the passing of a relative. Interestingly, the leaders who do this well often earn respect from the people who hear them out — supporters and critics alike.

Authenticity earns respect.

Perhaps you’re the manager of a team of airline staff who proactively rebook all of the connections for passengers of a flight that is delayed arriving at its destination, or a social media manager who responds to customer service concerns with genuine surprise and apology. In real, human tones.

The important lesson here is to offer something your competition does not. And remember that your competition could just as likely be other leadership candidates within your own organization as it could be a tech titan with a superior product.

Clarity

A human organization is clear. It knows how it serves its communities, how it communicates, and how it runs its business.

Every communication effort can benefit from clarity.

Consider how clarity applies to your communications department. Are you using simple language that reflects the way people really talk in your news releases, or are you relying on old “tried-and-true” phrasing like “ABC Corp is excited to announce blah blah blah”?

Clarity is one of the defining qualities of the Creative Commons.[4] Founders James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, and Hal Abelson took the process of licensing creative works, which had become complex from years of legal interference, and made it easier for copyright holders. Creative Commons provides tools and plain language which help copyright holders decide how they would like to license their works, and how they will communicate those licences. The licences are written in a way that facilitates a clearer understanding of the conditions under which others can use those works. Parameters include whether or not attribution is required, whether or not users can make money from the use and sale of the work, and whether or not users must enforce the same licensing parameters to downstream users.

Clarity is not hard to measure. One place to start is to conduct a clarity audit on your outward-facing materials. Can people understand what you’re trying to say? Like a bad joke, if it requires too much explanation to be appreciated, your message was probably not received.

End-user licence agreements (EULAs), community, and privacy policies are frequently criticized for being too long and too legal. At roughly fifty-six pages, the iTunes music store licence is unfathomably long for the average user to read, much less understand. Which is probably why so many people who use iTunes have no idea what they’ve agreed to (include us in that group).

The Tim Hortons coffee shop Wi-Fi terms-of-use agreement is 2,268 words long. Since the average person reads roughly 250 words per minute, the nine minutes it would take one of us to read the agreement would be longer than it would take to drink our coffee. That means most of us would be ready to leave before we were in a position to accept the terms and do anything meaningful online.

Privacy policies are another conundrum.

Tod’s website privacy policy is written in clear language. And, because the “personality” of his brand is friendly and even a bit non-traditional, it reads like someone speaking:

Man, I hate nosy browsers. I hate them worse than you do.… Still, there’s that whole “balance” thing — should I strip all good functionality out of my site and make it marginally functional but butt-ugly (I’m looking at you, Craigslist) or make it a more helpful site at the expense of some cookie-collecting?

I’m opting for the second.

What I Know About You: The only information my site collects about you are things that every single other web server in the world collects — your IP address, what web page your browser requested, and some basic info about your computer (your operating system, screen resolution, etc.). All websites collect this info. All of them. In fact, there’s no way to not collect this info. It’s just how the Web was built.

What I Do Not Know About You: Unless you manually fill in a form giving me that info, I have no idea who you are. I don’t know your age, your phone number, your email address, your street address, or why your mom calls you “Bosso.” Nothing you do on my site identifies you without you knowing about it. I mean, I suppose you could be filling in a Contact Me form in your sleep, but if that’s the case, you probably have bigger problems to deal with….

Don’t Blame Me: Also, my site uses some pretty standard third-party services (like Wufoo to make forms, Google to keep track of analytics, AdRoll to present you with reminders about my site in banner ads when you’re elsewhere on the Web, and so on). All these people have their own privacy policies, most likely written by people far more intelligent than I. I don’t have any control of what their sites or cookies do, but I wouldn’t use them if I thought they were evil. You should probably read their own policies if you’re freaked out about this stuff.

Of course, his light tone might not be appropriate for your brand. Still, there’s likely plenty of room for your official documents to be made less, well, officious.

By the way, you can read Tod’s entire privacy policy at http://todmaffin.com/privacy.

Clarity, of course, does not imply complete organizational transparency. You don’t need to publish everyone’s salaries online (though at least one company, BufferApp.com, does exactly that — and outlines the calculation it uses to determine what it pays people).

Clarity is about simplicity in your communications and directness in your phrasing. Legal, human resources (HR), sales, contracting, shipping and receiving … every department in every organization will benefit from clarity

Humanity

Finally, the most important factor. In all your efforts, you should strive to inject humanity into the mix. While many organizations find it difficult to make humanity part of their day-to-day operations, it’s actually easier than you might think — even in the digital age.

Mark has often referred to this as making “digital eye contact.” That is, being able to gain the undivided attention of an audience, no matter how small or large, even for a moment. It is possible to make eye contact online in a way that’s analogous to making eye contact with your lunch companion, the people you’re having a coffee with, or the conference hall you’re addressing. You need to be your human self, speak in a human tone, and use human language and human-relatable experience.

Instinct

Human companies have learned how to trust their “organizational gut feeling,” as articulated by the people in the trenches. If you’ve hired properly, you’ll have a team of smart, sensitive, feeling people. Their first instincts are often the best for your business.

For instance, consider how many organizations end up crippling their own efforts by trusting data over instinct. Suppose you issue a detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) to build a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. You’ll receive vendor proposals, each detailed by the requirements outlined in your RFP. But these data points don’t make up the entire picture. Immeasurable factors like “I just got a funny vibe from the sales guy” are as important (if not more so) than the line items detailed in the vendors’ responses.

While most organizations use the simple response-evaluating equation of Ability + Price = Decision, you should also factor intuitiveness into this calculation. Thus, decisions should be more along the lines of Ability + Price + Gut Feeling = Decision.

Back in 2000, Tod founded a dot-com company called MindfulEye, which developed artificial intelligence to understand the meaning behind online chatter. With this software, companies could gauge the subjective mood of public opinion on the Internet. With a few clicks, you could see a chart of people’s opinion of a given company. Tod’s company went public in eighteen months, and this category would later be known as sentiment analysis.

Several venture capital firms were vying to be the company’s second-round funder. Tod and his partners met with three such firms and evaluated them based on their past performance, skills of executives, and the proposed valuation and terms. But at one of these meetings, Tod’s group got a bad vibe from one of the vying firm’s leaders. They couldn’t put their finger on it, but something struck them as odd — perhaps a sense of distraction, perhaps of looking for a quicker stock turnaround than they wanted. Still, that group’s proposal on paper seemed strongest, and they discounted their gut feelings and went with that group.

While MindfulEye did well, they later found their instincts had been right — that firm probably wasn’t the best partner for long-term growth. MindfulEye grew to about twenty people before being caught up in the dot-com bomb and was unable to secure additional funding rounds. Trusting their gut would have placed the company on a more fruitful path.

Stories

Another component of building humanity into your organization’s mix is using anecdotes and storytelling as part of the corporate ethos. Leaders certainly need to communicate important information to their troops, but each time you do, you should look for a human story to articulate the impact on your actual customers, employees, shareholders, and partners.

This will be easier for some departments than others. Many marketing groups already develop character portraits to represent the people in their markets. (“Jill is a thirty-year-old junior executive who loves to travel and is trying to be better at fitness.”) But this kind of anecdotal information can and should extend to all parts of your organization.

 Your legal team should try to understand someone’s motivation for using your brand imagery without your permission. (Perhaps they’re a superfan and are trying to connect with your firm or share their enthusiasm to attract others to the products and services you offer.)

 Your human resources team should define custom benefits packages based on the real-world needs of your employees, not just accept what’s offered by a benefits administration firm.

 Your customer service team should rely less on scripts and instead try to picture the way people are interacting with your product or service, to better empathize with frustrations.

The ability to relate to people and communicate that quality in stories isn’t restricted to the Type-A personality leaders like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. It’s a skill anyone can learn, one that gets better with practice. One simple way to start is to identify what specific problem people had prior to using your organization’s services and then paint a picture of how your service has improved their lives.

Start now.

How You Relate

Likewise, you should strive to understand how your market understands you.

When automotive vertical site Edmunds.com was trying to better understand the people who use their service, the team reviewed millions of comments online to figure out how people were talking about specific cars. Toyota Corolla kept coming up associated with “college”; the Nissan Sentra was associated with “mom” and “daughter.”

Formerly the realm of heavy data processing tools, this kind of evaluation is a lot easier these days with social media monitoring tools like Sysomos. Even starting with a simple tag cloud — where the words that are most commonly associated with your company appear in a larger and heavier font the more frequently people use them — can help you understand how your market views you, the quality of your products and how they are using them.

Language

Starting today, you should strive to eliminate “corporate-speak” from as much of your organization as you can. True, there are some places where this simply won’t be possible because of regulatory requirements — financial and material disclosures, for example — but in most places, your words can probably be made more human.

This can even be something as simple as the use of contractions and real human emotions — “Whoa, that’s no good. I’ll check into that. Thanks for letting me know.”

Remember that your stakeholders rely on the people behind the brand to help them when needed.

Empathy

Perhaps the most important factor of building humanity into business is developing empathy. As Jayson Boyers, VP at Champlain College notes, “Though the concept of empathy might contradict the modern concept of a traditional workplace — competitive, cutthroat, and with employees climbing over each other to reach the top — the reality is that for business leaders to experience success, they need to not just see or hear the activity around them, but also relate to the people they serve.”

Early in his career, Boyers was responsible for overseeing his company’s largest division, which was suffering from poor employee morale and lack of trust in its leadership. “Rather than force my will and clean house,” he says, “I sat down with each employee to gauge their feelings about the company and talk about how to improve results. Through empathetic employee engagement, we could create a pathway to success.”

Don’t fall into the trap of false empathy, though. Many organizations undertake occasional employee or customer surveys to briefly gauge the level of happiness in those groups. Then, they do nothing with the results. Don’t use these surveys as a way of trying to fake empathy. True organizational empathy is based on action you take from what you learn. It’s worse to ask and then do nothing than to not ask at all.