Читать книгу The Employee Experience - Wride Matthew - Страница 10

It’s clear that in the quest for a stellar CX and the profits it yields, we have become seduced by the hype without really understanding what creates a positive revenue and service-enhancing Customer Experience in the first place.

Part of the problem is that there isn’t even agreement on how to gauge CX’s impact. How can you directly attribute growth or revenue increases to an improved Customer Experience? By definition, the term is a catchall for every interaction the customer has with an organization: first contact with a company’s website, an interaction with the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or your wait in the emergency room while your weeping child cradles her injured wrist. Who’s to say that one small sliver of the overall CX – caring service by a kind and helpful call center service rep, for example – might not be responsible for 80 percent of a company’s CX-related revenue spike, rendering the other CX measures mostly meaningless? Teasing out cause and effect can be maddening.

So we’re not going to try. Instead, we’re going to dig somewhere else and introduce you to a company that’s been doing things differently. Back in 2002, healthcare staffing firm CHG Healthcare Services was average. Growth rates were average. Sales and revenue figures were average. Employee turnover was – you guessed it – average. But the executive team had no interest in simply being average.

CHG wanted to be the largest and best healthcare staffing company in the country. However, its lukewarm corporate culture was restricting growth, and its turnover rate of 48 percent made it virtually impossible to hire and train employees fast enough to grow substantially. At that time, the CHG culture was similar to that of most companies: Communication was mostly top-down, divisional cultures differed, and HR focused on general administrative practices. It was a “good place to work,” but few employees were passionate about what they did.

CHG’s transformation started as an initiative to reduce turnover by understanding the issues that caused it. Leaders chose to focus on the value of their people, which led to a “Putting People First” program. They also decided to collect feedback from their employees and implemented an annual employee engagement survey, among other sources of communication. The feedback from employees was sometimes painful for the executive team to hear, but it provided many opportunities for improvement.

Gradually, CHG built a culture of feedback. Accountability and trust improved. Employees knew that their feedback was heard and acted upon. Today, CHG’s leaders regard the company’s employees as its strategic advantage. “Putting People First” is the defining organizational value, and it influences every decision. Employees rave about how much they love their jobs. CHG is at the top of our list of engaged organizations and has ranked as high as number 3 on Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list, in the same league as titans like Google and SAS.

During the weekend following the announcement that CHG had taken the number 3 spot on the Fortune list, dozens of employees were so proud of the accomplishment that they gathered for the better part of a Saturday – unbeknownst to management – to record a YouTube music video entitled “Three Is Our Magic Number.”14 For CHG, “Putting People First” was more than just a catchy phrase that served as a clever double entendre to their missions of placing candidates in healthcare positions and taking care of employees. Engaged employees, who were clearly the top priority at CHG, created engaging Customer Experiences.

As for results, CHG is the most profitable company in the healthcare staffing industry. Turnover has dropped to less than half the industry average, and the company even managed to grow revenue and profits during the 2008 to 2011 recession while industry peers saw profitability plummet. CHG knew where to dig.