when my best friend got up to speak at
my wedding her opening line was welcome
to Diana's dream she then explained how
trapping a hundred of my closest friends
and family on a remote island which is
what I did for my wedding represented a
mini version of a long-held fantasy to
build a commune I always loved the idea
of designing my own community especially
the idea of a small group of people who
really get each other because when
people get you they understand what you
do and why the journey you're on and
they shape your world in ways big and
small to make that journey easier great
companies can do this too
they can make you feel like they get you
like their product can help you on your
journey and they know how valuable that
is
marketers today use an arsenal of
sophisticated tools and techniques from
analyzing Facebook Likes and tweets to
going into customers homes and watching
them interact with their products to
building what they literally call
customer journey maps which are detailed
diagrams of every touch point the
company has with a customer all to
understand what makes buying difficult
and how they can make it easier all told
companies spend a trillion dollars a
year worldwide trying to understand and
shape the journeys of their customers
now a trillion is an astounding number
what's more astounding to me as an
expert in organizational behavior is
that companies spend a thousand times
less understanding and shaping the
journeys of the people they depend on
most their own employees and it shows
ask a chief marketer what makes your
customers shopping experience easy or
difficult and she'll have a 20 minute
answer probably segmented by customer
type but ask the chief of almost any
other department in the same company
what makes your employee
is life at work easier difficult and
you'll be met with a blank stare in fact
when we ask business leaders how much of
their time they spent understanding what
their employees do and why they do it
they said less than 5% now it's not the
companies don't care about their
employees they do employee engagement is
huge and you can see it in everything
from new employee training programs to
foosball tables and smoothie bars the
issue is that many of these efforts miss
the mark because they don't get to the
heart of what really drives our behavior
and they don't get there because
companies don't use the same
sophisticated tools techniques and
theories on their employees but they're
already using on their customers great
marketers rely on two fundamental
disciplines game theory which is the
idea that people act in their own
perceived best interests and sociology
which helps them predict what those best
interests might be now obviously
telemarketers haven't gotten this memo
thinking it's in your best interest to
be interrupted during dinner but Apple
is genius at this when they open the
Apple Store they wanted to understand
the customer experience so they track
the customers journey and found several
potential pain points or challenges that
would make the customer leave without
buying anything things like long lines
to pay confusion about which product by
fear that it might be difficult to use
so they introduced instant checkout to
eliminate the lines and demo tables for
easy sampling and Genius Bar
appointments for easy Q&A all to
eliminate those pain points and to make
buying an Apple product feel like the
smart easy choice and it works apple
sold 170 million iPhones last year and
earned accolades as a master of customer
touch points like in the Apple Store
everywhere you turn is a consumer
companies are trying to get you to alive
your interests with theirs
but contrast that with your experience
as an employee how much of your
experience at work feels carefully
constructed to eliminate pain points how
much of your behavior is thoughtfully
nudged into alignment with the company's
goals how well does your company really
get you for many the answer is not that
well and that's where I often come in
I'm hired by companies in crisis because
they can't get what they need from their
employees last year I was at a fortune
500 company that was losing market share
to competitors because they could not
get their employees to speed up product
development the head of development gave
rousing speeches about the importance of
speed and even introduced a performance
bonus for going faster but not if it
worked because no one realized that the
goal of going faster was completely at
odds with the journey of the product
developer C while the company aspired to
speed the path to product approval was
painfully slow and political developers
needed to get over a hundred informal
sign offs from people who would
determine their raises and promotions
now none of this was written down it
wasn't formal but developers knew that
by passing these steps meant career
suicide so in this context wasting lots
of valuable time getting sign-off was
actually the reasonable rational
strategy for every product developer
even though the result had the poor head
of development tearing his hair out in
other words the product developers
weren't slow because they were stupid
it's because they were smart going fast
would have meant damaging their own
careers and so surprise surprise they
weren't doing it in fact the bonus for
speed which was meant to be motivating
was actually just frustrating because it
couldn't be achieved and was just
another sign that the company didn't get
the world that they lived in it was only
when the company removed those pain
points
and align the developers interests with
theirs where the developer is able and
happy to meet the company's need for
speed now companies today just can't
afford this kind of ignorance about what
their employees do and why and
increasingly employees won't tolerate it
either in particular entitled
self-obsessed Millennials like myself
expect a thoughtfully designed working
environment not to mention a say in that
design the good news is companies don't
need to spend a thousand times more they
just need to pay more attention in the
right way Google is great at this they
examine the employee journeys of women
and found a pain point around maternity
leave it turned out that many women felt
they needed more than the three months
Google offered and so they quit so in
order to make staying easier and more
rational Google extended paid maternity
from 12 weeks to 18 weeks now I know
this is still absurdly short by many
countries standards but in the u.s. it
was a game changer and they increased
the retention of new moms by 50% so they
align the interests of women with the
interests of the company and created
immense value for both eight months
pregnant myself I cannot emphasize this
win-win strategy strongly enough so
business leaders have a golden
opportunity they can understand and
shape employee journeys the same way
they do customer journeys in fact they
can do it even better because they have
more touch points with employees than
with customers I'm not saying it's easy
it takes time energy and some often very
uncomfortable conversations about what's
really going on in the organization but
it's critical and it's not just in
business in schools think about the gap
between the goal of student learning and
what it actually takes to get go
grades or in sports between the desire
for teamwork and the celebration of
individual stats and achievement we can
bridge these gaps but only if we're more
thoughtful about the journeys we create
for each other we need to deeply
understand the obsessives at play and
reshape them so that what we want and
what the individual wants is the same
thing like in the Apple store or on my
island commune so if there is an
approach to understanding and shaping
behavior that works in the marketplace
why not bring it to the workplace
and any other place where it could make
life better thank you