Situation:
Customer Support Engineers, Internal company communication
Customer support engineers in the Japanese division of a U.S. multinational company needed to contact American development engineers in order to solve customer problems and demonstrate customer care. Due to differences in approach to writing email caused by cultural communication styles, problems were slow to be resolved - causing customer complaints.
Solution:
- Analyze numerous examples of electronic customer service correspondence between the U.S. and Japanese engineers.
- Produce a 3-day workshop for the Japanese engineers, explaining the different cultural approaches to communication skills best practices and providing practice in writing and re-writing email to be more easily understood.
- Train a local consultant already working at the Japanese division to continue the process and provide timely feedback to the engineers through an informal call center coaching program.
Result:
Increased speed in solving customer loytalty shortcomings, ongoing performance feedback loop via customer service coaching relationship between the consultant and engineering team.
Situation:
Performance management reviews for manufacturing employees.
A new system for performance reviews required every employee in an engineering, high technology and manufacturing company to complete a form detailing their contributions to the company and their career goals for the coming year. The first year this was instituted, the manufacturing manager and supervisors spent over two months helping limited English-speaking manufacturing employees complete the forms.
Solution:
• Create a guidebook with examples of how to answer the questions on the form and simple definitions of difficult terms.
• Provide two three-hour workshops with explanations and practice in writing measurable goals and using the guidebook.
Result:
Reduction in management and supervisor time by over 80%. (After the training, it took them only two weeks of involvement.)
Do Managers Really Make a Difference?
How do we get managers and senior executives more involved in management training and leadership development initiatives? With tightened budgets and increased pressure to perform, we are getting asked this question more than ever before.
The Answer:
- Relevance: Ensure that the training and development initiative is relevant to the participant, their boss, and the company.
- Make the Value Visible: Show the value in terms of behavior change and business impact.
While we have believed in Training RAI™: Relevance. Adoption. Impact for years, our recent study of 121 professionals and their managers at a major North American financial services firm, amplifies the impact of new manager involvement on the transfer of training.
Notice the extreme differences associated with manager involvement.
Insight #1: Coaching is linked to skill application. Are you providing reinforcement coaching for your critical initiatives? It could make a 20% difference.
Specifics:
- Comparison Groups:people who received individual coaching conversations versus those who did not
- Control Group: 47 participants who did NOT get individual coaching
- Coached Group: 61 participants who received individual and executive coaching – Note that the Coached Group scores were nearly 20% higher.
- Skill Scores: Each person’s average score for 38 individual skills, placed on a scale from 0-100%.
Insight #2: Coaching is linked to revenue. Are your sales managers coaching their direct reports to help meet revenue targets? It could double your revenue.
Specifics:
- Measurement: Each participant was asked for one example of how “coaching conversations with your manager have made a significant difference in a sales situation.” These were verified to include the situation, specific coaching, and results over the last three months.
- Significant Results: The Coached Group created 2x more new revenue over the same time period as the Control Group
Insight #3: Coaching is strongly linked to success. Is it worth a manager’s time? Just ask.
Specifics:
We asked, “What difference did the coaching conversations with your manager make in your success?
Significant Results: Participants in the coached group said their manager “made a significant difference” (72%) compared to “a little difference” (33%) for the noncoached group.
In Conclusion
So what?
With the majority of training programs failing to “move the needle” in terms of increased revenue, decreased costs, or increased productivity, it is imperative that companies focus on Relevant Skills and invest in Adoption to get results. Targeted coaching is certainly one of the keys to successful adoption.
These results clearly show that coaching conversations are linked to changes in leading indicators (skills) and lagging indicators (new revenue). Every change effort, training initiative, or development program must include more than the “training” of new knowledge and skills. Manager involvement is a key link to getting measurable results.
These days, job seekers intent on gaining any advantage in a tough market don't have to falsify their resumes. They can hire the "experts" at websites such as careerexcuse.com to do it for them. What’s worse, the folks at careerexcuse.com can create an entire network of fraudulent references to back up those fabricated claims.
Here's how it works. For a fee, careerexcuse.com will fill in gaps on a resume by creating a fictitious job with a phony title and salary history. Depending on the "client's" needs, it can also provide a fake address, website, and even a sham 800 number where trained operators are standing by to give glowing recommendations when prospective employers call.
Smart employers have known for years that many job hunters pad their resumes. But careerexcuse.com goes way beyond the fudging that individual candidates do. The web site is a sophisticated commercial operation whose sole purpose is to defraud employers.
William Schmidt, the founder of careerexcuse.com, says he got the idea for his business when he noticed job seekers on Twitter and Facebook asking for phony references from friends and acquaintances. A few months ago, he claimed to have helped at least twenty people find work under false pretenses and “feels great about it." He says he performs a public service by "opening doors for people who need a second chance."
Fighting back with intervewing skills best practicesSince selling fictitious resumes and references isn't exactly illegal—at least not yet—employers must be extra vigilant. We recommend a statement in your application process granting you "the right to call any references about the candidate’s prior work history and character.” This gives you permission to ask any reference for the names of other people who knew the candidate you are considering, and to contact them. The idea is to smoke out phony references and “break the chain of names” of positive references from friends and associates.
Some additional pointers:
- Determine how well the candidate’s resume matches what they may have posted on LinkedIn.
- Use the candidate’s LinkedIn connections for references when appropriate.
- Search the Web to see if a company listed on the candidate’s resume actually exists.
- Cross-reference telephone numbers with an online reverse search to validate a company’s identity.
- Avoid calling 800 phone numbers for reference checks.
Unfortunately, even legitimate companies can stymie your best efforts to vet candidates. Fear of lawsuits has led many businesses to divulge only the most skeletal information about former employees, which is why so many reference checkers don’t check references thoroughly.
Yet given the lengths to which some job seekers seem willing to go, it's crucial to investigate carefully. And that brings us to the behavior-based interview. We have long stressed the need for interviewers to probe for the authenticity of answers in an interview because of the limits to reference checking. In today's increasingly unethical environment, the interview remains the most reliable way to judge a candidate's qualifications.
Getting the truth
A successful interviewing best practice to is to focus and probe. It goes beyond the information on the resume, which just might be a figment of someones imagination. Equally important, an interview should be conversational, not confrontational. Decades of management training program and talent management consulting experience have shown us that people reveal the truth about themselves when they're relaxed, not when they're on the defensive.
In the interview, it may be helpful to probe for dates, names, and specifics of the job that are not on the resume. Ask the candidate to describe in detail a typical day in that job. Find out the names of anyone they may have reported to or worked with and who knows their work well. Suggest you may call these individuals for additional references. Prior to ending the behavior-based interview, ask the candidate, “What else should I know about your job performance before I follow up on these references?”
We don't think that every job candidate lies. But we do think that the existence of web sites selling counterfeit references and even identities makes it a lot easier for today’s candidates to stretch the truth. That means due diligence is essential. The overall satisfaction and retention of your employees is at risk if this key business process is broken or flawed.
A recent survey conducted by Chief Learning Officer Magazine found that at least 74% of those surveyed stated that they work in a virtual team environment or manage a global cross-functional team. Virtual and global cross-functional teams are now the norm, and not the exception.
When teams are dispersed geographically, they face some common challenges related to being remote:
How do you ensure that these teams communicate effectively and efficiently? How can you create a "virtual water cooler" so that information and best practices impact all team members? How do you integrate cultural influences and differing perspectives in a way that makes sense? How do you incorporate effective communication and collaboration best practices into existing management training initiatives and leadership development programs?
Here are 10 simple talent management and communications skills tips to ensure that your virtual and global teams are on track.
1. Share the Pain
Each evening, someone’s dinner is inevitably ruined during a global team’s conference call. For that person half-way around the world, a call in the evening after a long day at work can be trying. Assuming that most people do not want to have dinner during a conference call, what can be done to alleviate time difference challenges and increase global teamwork? Always being the person or group with the late night or 6 AM call is a drag. But people show remarkable flexibility if they can see that the pain is shared. Remember to Share the Pain—rotate with one location taking the early morning time slot one month and the evening slot the next month. You will be surprised at the results.
2. You do yoga, too?Recently, a colleague in India casually mentioned to his US-based team member that he did yoga at home after the calls. His US teammate’s ears perked up and soon the teammates were IM’ing about their latest yoga insights. Not unusual, you might think, except these two had never connected even though they were on the same team for over two years. It was surprising how much better they communicated and worked together after this small personal connection. Remember, “you do yoga, too”—use little bits of “scrap time” to develop a virtual relationship and build rapport.
3. Conference call as Podcast
For some people, attending calls outside of work hours is just not possible because of personal constraints. A client recently shared how she solves that problem by recording these conference calls, downloading them, and then playing them back on her way to the office. Listening to the calls gives her an immediacy that she says is lacking when she reads the notes. She can also gauge people’s level of interest or concern by the sound of their voices.
4. You’re kidding…it’s that late?
While some people may be willing to meet for a late night conference call, it is good to at least know what time it is where they are so you can thank them for their flexibility. To tell what time it is at your global sites, there are a number of terrific web resources like http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html. You can enter your teammate’s cities and instantly see what time it is in up to four worldwide locations.
5. Why are we here?
OK, be honest. How many meetings have you been pulled into when you don’t know the purpose of the meeting or why you were invited? It’s the same with global conference calls. If people know the expected outcome of the calls, they are more likely to be of value. Remember the simple meeting management rule of thumb: prior to any conference call, send call participants the desired outcomes, their roles and responsibilities, the overall objective for the call, and the objectives for each agenda item (a plan, a decision, and agreement).
6. Keep'em focused
Business Need
As a global provider of Internet services, having experienced rapid growth, vast market and organizational change, VeriSign recognized in late 2005 that innovation and operations were suffering from reduced collaboration due to growth and the need to have teams work virtually. With major functions in India, Washington D.C., San Jose, and many individual acquisitions in other areas, sales revenue growth increased but service suffered.
Goals
- Bring a fragmented, global team together.
- Assist in transitioning a highly technical workforce into a more consultative, collaborative high performance organization.
- Change in how the technical, global teams functioned and work together—from silos to teams.
- Improve customer loyalty and satisfaction for the IT Infrastructure and Product Development Groups
Solution
We were engaged initially in early 2006 to help build consensus within the leadership team (including the CTO and CEO) for what came to be known as the Customer Focus Program. We developed a mechanism to communicate the change, why it was important, and how it would impact each discipline. We created education, leadership development workshops and coaching prior to rolling out a series of Consultative Partnering workshops. Approximately 1,200 people in the Infrastructure and Product Development Groups attended these workshops over a two-year period using real life scenarios and business cases to examine different approaches and attitudes. We advised VeriSign on changing organizational and operational elements that presented obstacles to customer service strategy execution and focus, and provided coaching to existing and new managers in how to work with staff to reinforce skills and drive the needed behavioral changes.
Results
At the completion of our engagement at the end of 2007 the teams were working more collaboratively and the organization was more unified and focused on building customer loyalty.
Some specific examples included:
- The Network Operations Center utilized three of our Consultative Partnering tools to understand common systemic issues and build alignment around their solutions. These call center best practices contributed to a reduction in call center volume on systemic issues by 50%.
- After attending the customized virtual teaming workshop the leadership team realized that the primary issue was not an inability to be strategic, as they had thought, but was an inability to execute well. This changed their management training and strategy significantly.
- Several teams reported significant reductions in rework after using the Consultative Partnering tools to establish greater rapport with their internal customers, understand their needs better, and build responsive technology solutions.
Navigating Your Career Program - A Case Study in Talent Management
Client Background
The client is a Silicon Valley company that helps retailers and consumer products manufacturers understand, predict, and shape consumer demand. They have 400 employees in several global locations. The employees include many software developers and analytics experts.
Business Situation
The client is facing new competition from a large company that has just launched a new product to compete in its core space. The company does not want to lose the most valued employees as the economy improves during this time when they need speed to market for some new products of their own. If the execution of their strategic business plan slows down for any reason, they risk losing valuable market share.
Objective
The objective is to create a development culture within the organization as a strategy to engage employees and retain top talent.
Outcome
The client is working to establish a company-wide talent management and career development process.
“I want to give a big "THANK YOU!" for setting up the Career Development Course, Navigating Your Career. The class was terrific both in content and in the manner in which it was conducted.
What made the content so helpful was that it was specific and gave proactive steps and allowed us to practice one-on-one with another.
The management workshop also demonstrated that our company was serious about wanting people to make a career with the company. The company wasn't just giving it lip service, it was putting its money where its mouth is and proving it. The class gave us a better grasp of the tools we needed [to be] better employees and have a better career even if we didn't stay with the company. That is impressive!”
