Are your leaders and employees just going through the motions each day? Do your employees just perform tasks and transactions rather than create relationships and talk excitingly about customer experiences? Do your leaders and management team just bark out orders and are task masters spending wasted time babysitting the staff? Perhaps you need to think differently.
Have you ever heard of the word “Kaizen”? I was recently reading an article on what makes some businesses and organizations better than others. The article discussed many great business strategies but one stood out the most. It was Kaizen. What is Kaizen? Kaizen is a Japanese concept in business studies which states that significant positive results may be achieved due to the cumulative effect of many, often small improvements to all aspects of a company’s operations. Kaizen is to actively and continuously improve every facet of a company’s production and requires the participation of all employees from the CEO to front line workers.
So what if you applied that to your present customer and employee experience and no longer settled for status quo. Here are some questions and or areas where you can ask yourself and team where you can continuously improve to change and strive for better each and every day.
- Do you recognize problems or opportunities and work on them together as a team?
- Can you remove unnecessary steps or roadblocks that are preventing your team from creating a memorable customer experience?
- When you see things aren’t working in the operation do you actually tackle them, one at a time?
- Do you listen to team members? Are ideas, innovation and employee initiative encouraged so people can voice their opinions?
- Do you have a safe work environment where if people have an issue or concern, they can voice it?
- Have you discussed, rewarded or coached any employee on your core values?
- Have you evaluated your on-boarding process to improve your new hire’s first impression of your business?
- What about training? Do you have the right people to conduct the training? Do you have an effective training program or do you just throw your new hires into the swimming pool and hope they don’t sink?
If you think that many of those challenges and more are just put aside and worked on when you get a chance or worse yet hope they just go away, then you are not practicing Kaizen. The question then becomes, Is your competition practicing Kaizen? Are you losing customers as they continuously improve their customer experience, build valuable relationships, give their customers what they really want and need while you stay the same and just hope things get better.
What about your employee experience? Are you still complaining, frustrated and coming up with excuses why you can’t find or have great people working in your business. Or are you practicing Kaizen and continuously looking to improve the employee experience to create an environment where your staff feels appreciated, recognized, important and given ongoing training to show that you care about their success?
In other words, are you continuously looking to improve the workplace environment. Are you the company or business that others want to work for? That is a lot easier than spending time and money constantly trying to find and hire people.
So, what can you do? Well, you can continue to practice insanity by doing same things or status quo or you can practice Kaizen. Why not get your people and everyone involved in the process. You will then be the successful business and have the best customer and employee experience that you always dreamed of. Now that would be “Magical”.
Need help? If you are frustrated and tired of losing customers to your competition because of an average customer experience. Or you are losing employees faster than you hire them and wish you had a better work environment with engaged employees that you don’t have to babysit, then booking an affordable workshop or coaching call with John is the right decision.
Don’t wait! Practice KAIZEN and contact John today and become the business, leader and team that EVERYONE loves!
John Formica is America’s Customer Experience Coach, team culture expert, keynote speaker, and Top 10 Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Customer Loyalty. For information on customer experience programs, leadership training, how to find and hire great people, affordable tailored training programs or to book John to speak at your next event, contact 704-965-4090 or visit our website at JohnFormica.com.