Author: akc

Verbal Venn Diagrams: The Great Resignation

Verbal Venn Diagrams: The Great Resignation

by akc

Verbal Venn Diagrams: The Great Resignation

A deliberately incomplete roundup of perspectives on a topic. This time, The Great Resignation.

The People Who’d Rather Quit than Give Up Remote Work, Alison Green at Slate

An exploration of whether or not this is really happening to the extent it seems in the media. The piece weaves together a series of quotes from people who have left their jobs or are thinking of leaving.

People Want to Work, They Just Don’t Want to Work for You, Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At

For knowledge workers who were going into an office, remote work brought all the problems – petty or substantial – of work into people’s homes. Work problems invaded a much more intimate space. “And anything that’s a problem has to justify its presence in your home and in your life, with no real tradeoff other than how much you’re being paid to tolerate it.”

The Great Resignation is Here, and it’s Real, Phillip Kane at Inc.

Millions of people have left their jobs, and most of the rest are thinking about it. Turnover is expensive, and you as a leader can do something to get people to stay. Ask what your staff want, and make it happen.

Why It’s Important to Embrace the Great Resignation and Just Let People Go, Stacey Epstein at FastCompany

People stay if they’re happy in their roles. Most people who are looking to leave right now aren’t unhappy, but they are looking for change after months of stagnation. Let them go with no hard feelings, and enjoy the fresh perspectives your new hires will bring.

We Ride Upon Sticks

We Ride Upon Sticks

by akc

Once a month I recommend a novel that I’ve recently read and enjoyed. This month’s combines witchcraft with a high school women’s field hockey team and is set in late-80’s Massachusetts. 

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

Pantheon Books, March 2020
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

The Danvers High School women’s hockey team is . . . not great. For the 1989 season, the seniors decide to do something about this. In a notebook with Emilio Estevez on the cover, they pledge themselves to the devil in exchange for the team making it to State. 

For those who don’t know, Danvers (formerly Salem Village) was the epicenter of the witchcraft hysteria in 1692. This, of course, means that their pledge works. It probably doesn’t hurt that one of the co-captains is descended from the family of Ann Putnam, one of the primary accusers during the hysteria and trials. 

We ran off the field like a bunch of frenzied maenads carrying aloft the head of some poor slob that we’d recently torn off his shoulders.

Anyway, this is when the fun really starts. Having vowed to follow their dark urges, they begin playing pranks on their teachers. Each is recorded in the notebook, and the team starts winning. It escalates from there.

The story is told in first person plural, which works beautifully. It captures the bond between them as teammates, while subtly pointing out the possibly malevolent groupthink driving them towards what they hope will be victory. The team is an entity unto itself; while it is made up of individuals (whom you do get to know), they are all acting as one.

I cannot stress enough how fun this novel is, especially if you were in middle or high school in Massachusetts in the late 80s or the 90s. In the book, one girl’s sky-high bangs become their own character (The Claw) and I immediately pictured a specific classmate’s hair.
While I don’t like how the ending was structured, that gripe is outweighed by everything else I loved about this book. If you’ve played a team sport, were a teenager in the late 80s or early 90s, or were ever a teenage girl, you’ll probably enjoy at least one aspect of this novel.   

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation

by akc

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation, by James D. and Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick

ATD Press, October 2016
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

I picked this up looking for a framework or method to evaluate training delivered to customers and end users, since that’s my recent background. If you’re running a certification program with engaged stakeholders from your customer and access to the trainees after the fact, this might fit the bill. If you’re doing something less intensive, there are a few chapters with some useful info that you could likely put into practice, but half of the model won’t be practical for you.

Where this model is meant to be used is internal training programs, particularly those that are meant to change foundational employee behaviors. I think this is best suited to supervisory or leadership training, workshops on relationship building for customer-facing teams, that kind of thing. (Durable or semi-durable skills, if you’re familiar with that concept.) But again, for less intensive training you may still find some useful aspects.

The four evaluation levels of the model are Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results. Briefly, you can think of them as satisfaction with the training itself, the extent to which attendees acquire the knowledge delivered, whether or not they actually apply that knowledge, and whether the training has moved the needle on specific outcomes. They are progressively harder to measure, but their impact and usefulness to the business also increases.

Reaction is easy to measure in the moment, and you can capture some aspects of Learning as well. But to get at Behavior and Results, you need to have planned the entire training with them in mind. The authors recommend that you start planning by gathering your stakeholders and identifying the specific results you need — the targeted outcomes, and leading indicators that can act as measures. There’s a lot of good info to assist with this part.

This sets you up to ensure that what you’re teaching and how you’re doing it are actually going to meet the need. It also opens a conversation that will unearth barriers for trainees when they try to apply what they learned. For example, maybe your organization wants customer-facing staff to build better relationships with customers. You’ll want to look at the KPIs those teams are supposed to meet, and adjust them to reflect the fact that they’ll be spending more time with each customer if they put these new behaviors into practice. If leaders are unable or unwilling to do that, then the potential impact of the training will be diminished. 

Overall I found the first half of this pretty engaging, as there were parts of it that were applicable to the type of training I had in mind. I also thought Chapters 10 and 11 would be a great reference, as they discuss how to approach creating measurement instruments and provide tons of examples. You’d be able to put together a decent tool pretty quickly with that information.

The second half was of less interest to me. Part 3 covers data analysis and reporting, and part 4 (which I skipped) is a series of case studies. There are also two or three chapters sprinkled throughout that were written by guest authors, and I found those to be less useful.

If you’re part of an internal training or learning and development team and you’re not already familiar with this model, this is worth a read. If you’re training customers but don’t typically have a strong commitment from stakeholders to support the training, this may still be helpful. In that case I’d recommend that you pick and choose chapters and skim or skip what doesn’t feel relevant for your situation.

The North Star

The North Star

by akc

The North Star

If you find yourself in a situation where you need to lead your team through transformational change, one of the things you’ll need to do is articulate a strategic vision that they can rally around. One way to approach this is by treating it as a mini strategic plan, but depending on the scope this might feel like overkill for a project at a division or department level. And anyway, a strategic plan might not be an easy way into the vision for the folks actually doing the work that will be impacted. (This is especially true if they tend to feel disconnected from your organization’s strategic goals.)

Plus, you might get mired in the “plan” part of strategic planning. You know where you need to get to, but there’s a landscape of unknown unknowns between you and your destination. You may not know the details of how you’ll get there, or what kind of problems you’ll have along the way. How can you plan for all of that if you don’t have the expertise or the time to figure it out? 

This is when you might reframe your strategic vision as your North Star. You can see the North Star, but it’s far away. You can’t really tell how far, or what’s in between it and you. Sometimes it’s occluded by the clouds; at other times you might be distracted by something else in the sky. And you probably have no idea what it’s actually going to be like when you get there. Sounds like transformational change to me.

This worked well for us with customer support. We needed to create significantly more operational efficiency, so we could scale as the business grew. We also needed to improve the customer experience. Ultimately we wanted to set up a customer self-service website where users could find answers to common questions and more straightforward technical issues, and then just as easily submit a support case if needed. 

There was a lot of other work to do before we could build a self-service site, starting with overhauling case handling. I used the self-service website as our North Star throughout the process of building out modern case handling tools and revamping the business processes for support. Having a clear North Star was a helpful way to frame some of the decisions we made. “Will this work for us when…? How do we set this up if we eventually want to…?” 

I find the concept of the North Star also helps when you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed or tired of the initiative. It offers a way to think about your goal that’s less focused on the work, and sets up the destination as something to aspire to reach. Sure, you still have to do all the tasks and actions, but you don’t always need to have them front and center when reminding yourself why you’re doing all this work.

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The Effortless Experience

The Effortless Experience

by akc

The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi

Portfolio/Penguin, September 2013
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

As I read The Customer of the Future, this book kept coming to mind so I decided to revisit it. At the time I first read The Effortless Experience, my team and I were just starting the process of choosing and configuring a new support system. It was interesting to re-read this on the other side of that experience, having overhauled the support program and gotten it to a much more sustainable place. I remember my first read of it was very positive, and it helped to develop my mindset as I went into the project.

While it’s focused on call centers and support by phone, the authors do go into some research around how consumer preferences were shifting from phone to web. For myself, I found that subbing “cases” for “calls” as I read worked just fine. A lot of the concepts apply to support in general, regardless of channel. The details would differ in implementation, but they would anyway.

One of the biggest takeaways from this is the research they did that debunks the idea that exceeding customer expectations is the best way to ensure customer loyalty. They found that customer behavior plateaus when you meet expectations, and doesn’t significantly rise if you’re exceeding them. Consistently exceeding expectations is costly, and to some extent just continues to raise the bar, constantly resetting the baseline expectations of your customers. Really, customers just want you to be easy to deal with, something I’m sure we can all agree with as customers ourselves.

They developed a measure for this called the Customer Effort Score, which you can obtain with a single survey question asking the customer how easy you made it for them to deal with their issue. You can collect that alongside your standard satisfaction measure and get a better picture of what’s going on.

The concepts presented in The Effortless Experience are well-researched and presented clearly. They’re backed up with data, and the authors include some very useful looking worksheets in an appendix.

This is a quick read, and I’d recommend it for anyone working in support, not just team leaders and managers. Re-reading it I found that I wished I’d treated it as a reference after that initial read, as there were some ideas that would have been helpful for us as we developed some training for team members and built new business processes.

For a great preview of the book, check out this article in Harvard Business Review, written by some of the book’s authors in 2010: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.

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