DIY INNOVATION

There are such roles as Innovation Manager now in the world! I had the pleasure of listening to two such pioneers describe what they do; Rowena Morrow (pictured), Innovation Leader at the City of Booroondara and Rick Bottiglieri, City of Yarra spoke at the LGPro Annual Conference in Melbourne.

They characterised innovation as leadership, but the locus of that leadership varied markedly between the two. Rowena was tasked by her CEO to 'subvert' the order to change processes - outcomes were not specified. Rick took more of a leadership down tack, focusing on activities to generate new ideas at the top. I will focus on the bottom up approach here because I think that it is intrinsically more challenging for Managers to invite innovation from their subordinates, and this approach can potentially yield more results.

There was agreement, however, that important pre-conditions must be put in place for effective innovation - leadership and strategy. By this, they meant:

• Clear understanding of the purpose, vision and goals of an organisation
• Passion - managers must walk the talk
• Innovation must be encouraged at all levels
• Time (space) and resources must be set aside specifically to encourage innovation
• Someone must be scanning for trends and potential areas for innovation by observing and reflecting on what others are doing and benchmarking the organisation against best practice; and
• Opportunities must be provided to stakeholders (staff, customers) to give feedback on processes and results.

Further, to support innovation there must be trust. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum:

• There must be a mindset to empower and support people to bring innovative solutions to completion;
• Organisations must build the agility to shift or obtain skills and resources to meet new and emerging needs and opportunities; and
• Be prepared to make it quick - give change a try and be prepared to let some ideas fail quickly.

Rowena Wallace told us that at Booroondara the innovation initiative started with a few premises:

• Make space for new ideas;
• Subvert the hierarchy - anyone can have great ideas; and
• Talk about challenges, not problems  - what can innovation do for you?

The first step was to allow people to allocate time and space to innovate. For example, there was:

• The 'Crazy Ideas Group', which focused on users and stakeholders and encouraged diverse input; and how about the....
• 'Randon Acts of Coffee' iniitative, where people were given coffee breaks with people outside their work teams to encourage them to get to know other parts of the business and build connections; 
• The 'Ideas Portal ', which invited people to submit ideas online for consideration; 
• Newsletter stories were published internally about what was possible;
• Unusual open office layouts were implemented (including some hot-desking) to get away from the physical (and by implication) mental delineation of roles in the workplace; 
• Ideation Teams - team volunteers invited to look at ideas, experiment with them and evaluate their practical implementation in projects; and
• Design It Challenges were held where teams of 2-3 people drawn from across the organisation were invited to deliver a report and potentially see it adopted.

The focus was squarely on learning from doing and trying to convert ideas to projects. To this end the following framework was provided to us to illustrate the approach:

It was clearly recognised that engaging staff was the key to making innovation work, so 'Innovation Temperature' surveys were conducted to see where staff rated Council's innovation were conducted at the beginning of the project and progressively thereafter. (By the way, these showed progress!)

This session certainly had me thinking and any medium to large scale organisation could probably find something in these ideas that could be of benefit in their workplace.

INNOVATION

At the recent LGPro Annual Conference - #LGPRO15 - for local government in Melbourne there were four advertised themes - leadership, empowered communities, A Better Self (AKA personal development) and 'New Thinking' - but the focus in each session was something else again - innovation. It was thought provoking to take one concept and dice it so many ways...

To get to the heart of the matter, sometimes it's worth asking the dumb questions - why do we innovate?

The text book definition of innovation cited was 'changing or creating more effective processes, products and ideas'. Hard to argue with the merit of that!

We've all heard about when Kodak made a spectacularly bad call when they decided to ignore digital photography - and how they foundered as a result. In these sessions we also heard a number of accounts of what large corporations are doing to encourage innovation - and there's the rub - despite their obvious advantages in skill, technology and scale, the advantages of larger scale of these organisations poses another challenge - inertia. It's relatively straight-forward for small businesses led by an entrepeneur to be innovative. Start ups and smaller companies live by their wits and have to overcome challenges like lack of scale, people, systems, resources constantly.

With larger organisations, the very systems, hierarchies and people told to perform a role in particular ways - combined with human nature - can kill innovation stone dead. Some people will defend the status quo for various reasons, like..

•  Things suit me now
• I find it hard to keep up with constant change
• This is my world, my role is my status, 
• This is the procedure I was told to follow, 
• I don't make the rules here and
• Pecking order rivalries

The unspoken theme of this conference was how do we recognise this inertia to do the same things all the time, and how do we tap into the creativity of our people?

Having asked the dumb questions, stand by for some posts touching on some answers.

Strategies for Helping Customers with Disabilities

We all have a moral responsibility to help others with a disability to participate in society, and also a legal one not to discriminate against people with a disability.

Under the Disability Discrimination Act in Australia it is illegal to treat someone a person with a disability less favourably than a person without the disability in the same or similar circumstances. For example, it would be direct disability discrimination for a blind person to be refused entry to a restaurant because they have a guide dog. It may be considered indirect discrimination if they only way to enter a public building is by a set of stairs because people who require wheelchair access would be unable to enter the building. Particular areas of public life covered by the Act concern employment, education, accommodation, getting or using services and access to public places. To read more on this go to https://www.humanrights.gov.au/know-your-rights-disability-discrimination.

Legalities aside, it’s always worth trying to consider how your customer engage with you, including those with disabilities, and if you use an outsourced contact centre, to consider what they can do to assist on your behalf.

The Australian Government offers an excellent free National Relay Service for people with a hearing or speech impairment. Using a Teletypewriter hearing or speech impaired people can make calls or receive calls using the keyboard and monitor on their TTY device with a Relay Officer providing the voice interface. From the point of view of the business or contact centre that they call, it’s just like a normal call, although a bit slower as communications are relayed back and forth. Should your contact centre need to call back the caller, however, agents need to know that the caller uses TTY (sometimes you may get a message on their phone to this effect, or just a fax tone, or nothing at all) and how to access the TTY service. This is mostly a training issue, not a cost issue, that we can all factor into our business operations to assist people with these disabilities.  In Australia all you need to do is call 136677 and ask to be put through to the TTY user phone number.

Having a hearing impairment doesn’t necessarily mean that you are deaf, of course. A core part of Customer Service training is to pitch your communications to the customer; it may be enough to speak slowly, clearly and a bit louder than usual to communicate with a person with a hearing impairment.

Another approach is to offer online help such as Live Chat on your website. Again, your contact centre can assist with this. Usually there’s a monthly access fee for the service and then it’s on usage; it may not cost much to have in place. (This is a service that we can offer you at Well Done.)

For the vision impaired, contact centre support becomes even more important. Here the training focus must be on patience, empathy and clear explanations; it’s not enough just to refer to or recite from the website. Similarly, customers with a learning or intellectual disability can still need to call for assistance, and training staff to have the patience to try to explain things in a variety of ways without being judgmental is key. Someone who has trouble taking in what they are told may need some extra prompting to note the information down, and more time to process this. Agents need training and experience to recognise this kind of disability as it’s not something most people will announce upfront; normal courtesy gives both parties a little time to assess each other’s communication style and a slow rate of exchange is often a vital clue.

A number of our clients support customers with a disability. Well Done agents regularly interact with callers from the broad spectrum of the general public. If you have any concerns about customer service delivery to your client base and would like to know more about outsourced contact centre services, please contact our Sales Team on 1300 551 796 or make an enquiry on the website contact form for follow through.

CUSTOMER SERVICE DRIVES THE SWITCHERS

Research undertaken by independent research company Opinion Matters over 4-14 April 2014 with a sample size of 2,004 adults in Australia is worth considering for any business. We have to thank contact system provider NewVoiceMedia for bringing this research to our attention.

10 key questions were asked. The key responses revealed the following...

Switching providers

•   58% have switched to a different business as a result of poor customer service. Of this group, there was no gender difference and the reasons given for switching were, in order:

-        46%: Didn’t feel appreciated as a customer

-        38%: Staff unhelpful and rude

-        32%: transferred too many times

• Of those who switched, the average spend over a year for the product or service in question was $807; extrapolated to Australian consumers overall, this equates to $8 billion per year

Waiting to be answered 

• People hated being put on hold, but we were surprised how long people reported that they would wait:

-        19% said that they were prepared to wait up to 5 minutes and 52% would wait 5-10 minutes. 

-    Generally women were more prepared to hold than men, and surprisingly, those aged over 55 years were less patient than people in the 16-24 age group.

-        The most impatient were 15% of women and 23% of men, who indicated that they would hang up within 5 minutes of holding.

 Does Good Customer Service win Loyalty?

• About three quarters of all age groups reported that they would be more loyal, or actively recommend a company that provided good service to them.

Which Communication Channels were preferred?

• At 59%, calling was the most popular channel for communication with a business, ahead of email (32%) and social media (12% cited this as most effective). 
• However, there were generational differences with this; 26% of those aged 16-24 believed that social media to be the most effective means to resolve an issue, with Facebook being the favoured social network for interacting with business.
• Even so, when it came to obtaining the quickest response, the ratings changed again, with 73% opting for telephone over email (16%) and social media (3%).

We think that there is one other thing that businesses should consider with this research. Most people responding to this survey were probably thinking of their interactions with larger businesses. We might settle in for a 40 minute wait to speak to someone at a large organisation, but we won't wait anything like that for a small business. But what happens if your line is busy? 

Most of these large organisations have sophisticated queuing systems to encourage people to wait. If you have one line into your business and it's busy, what's your fall back? This is where a well briefed answering service could be of value. You need only overflow your calls during business hours to ensure that you need never miss a call. 

The research above looks mainly at switchers - the existing customers you stand to lose. What about the ones you never get as well? What percentage of your calls are new sales enquiries? If you divide the number of sales enquiries by your advertising and marketing budget, you can arrive at a very real cost of obtaining each sales enquiry - and this is before you even work out the average value of each sale that you land. Very sobering!

Well Done is an Australian owned and managed contact centre provider. To find out how to get a reception service us with us - anything from a simple message service to complex support - call Well Done on 1300 551 796 or make an enquiry on our website at http://www.welldone.net.au/contact.php We would be pleased to discuss your business requirements and quote.

Work-Life balance is no zero-sum game

Don’t you just love it when someone tells you something that you just know is right but you hadn’t actually put it into words before?

A few years ago a breakthrough book by Daniel Goleman entitled Emotional Intelligence was published. It contained detailed physiological information about what happens when we engage, or don’t engage with each other. It went a long way to explain to me why some of the people you met in school who blitzed the tests didn’t necessarily go on to be amazingly successful in their professional life, and vice-versa. Reading David Klaasen’s guest blog at HR Daily on the effect of analytical thinking and social thinking on brain activity and how this relates to leadership in business advanced this discussion significantly for me.

Essentially the research shows that you use different parts of your brain when you are thinking analytically than when you are thinking socially and, when you have activated one, the other is correspondingly restrained. Klaasen is director of a niche HR consultancy, Inspired Working Ltd, so his focus is on how this impacts leadership, productivity and business performance. 

He cited a leadership study which showed a towering imbalance in the analytical and social skills of business leaders, with the percentage of leaders scoring highly on both analytical and social skills a trivial 0.77%, indicating that social skills are not being valued in leadership selection and development.

Here’s the trick. According to Professor Matt Lieberman, neuroscientist at UCLA, social skills are a multiplier. This explains why organisations with great team work and intelligent, highly competent staff consistently outperform those with high human capital but low social capital. Social skills are the key to engaging staff and unlocking their contribution to the work.

Lieberman then revisited some classic experiments with some of the new insights in neuroscience to show that when you learn information and your goal is to share it with others, you use the social thinking mechanisms located on the midline of the brain where the two hemispheres meet and therefore do not only rely on your analytical thinking. Apparently the more active this area of the brain is during a learning experience, the better we remember what we learn and the more inclined we will be to share it with others.

Sounds like a win – win – win. We learn (and enjoy) more, we share information, and we become more productive to boot! No longer is the work-live balance a zero-sum game. It just requires a subtle shift in our thinking from the outset to harness this powerhouse of productivity and innovation.