Clever programs cant change culture

Clever programs can’t change culture.

Customers screech in your ear each week with the same message, “Your service sucks!” You’ve dedicated endless hours searching for the magic customer service model and asked your entire HR department to craft a series of seminars, activities, and meetings to instruct your service representatives and energize them with a vision of exceptional customer care. Invitations are sent, buzz is generated, but the handful of service representatives who show up are late, glossy-eyed, and pessimistic. What went wrong? You hire a consultant for feedback, and here’s what she says:

  1. Your employees don’t know you personally care. The entire customer service group thinks the program’s just another HR offering because you’ve directed your HR team to create the program and haven’t championed it yourself ((Goleman, pg. 227)).

  2. You ignored the culture. The customer service team is discouraged from training opportunities by its managers because training pulls them away from customer engagement. Each member’s performance is rated by how many calls they take with customers and whether they’ve asked every question on a pre-defined checklist. The few who showed up to the seminar were part of a growing number who hunt for a reprieve from the probing eyes of their managers.

  3. You singled out the customer service team when the issue is a company-wide culture. The customer service managers learned their performance-tracking from the engineering managers, who track every half-hour their engineers work and the quantity of projects they complete.

  4. You wanted a panacea, you need a process. A two week program may germinate a new culture but it won’t fuel it’s growth. You must seek out your employee’s feelings and perspectives about customer service, encourage them that you want positive change to happen, then partner with them to effect those changes.

The proliferation of bullet-list answers to common business and personal problems exposes the U.S. tendency to solve problems with patchwork knowledge and quick fixes. An entrepreneur who realizes his business needs to change if it’s going to survive must deny his urge to merely solve and carry on. He must accurately assess the existing culture, it’s strengths and weaknesses, and the emotions of his direct reports towards the work and vision. When he begins to implement change, he must show personal conviction and elicit the team’s help to transition and grow. If done well, an entrepreneur can replace his organization’s crumbling foundation with solid rock and position it to capture emerging opportunities. If done poorly, he can bankrupt his business building programs that change nothing.

Transforming culture is hard work. No one size fits all program exists, and the labor isn’t measurable like an eight-hour day or the sum of a work product. As my co-workers at kCura continue to redefine our team’s role, this insight reminds me that the bare processes are not all that’s at stake. An underlying culture exists, both team and company-wide, which helps or hinders the changes we must make to become a valuable contributor to our customers and to kCura.

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