Five New Rules for Management

The Gallup Management Journal released an article titled: "Five New Rules for Management: Lessons From Some of the World's Best Companies."

Rule 1: You can't measure and manage the employee and customer
experiences as separate entities.

"...this means that you cannot separate the responsibility for the quality of a company's employee relationships from the responsibility for the quality of its customer relationships."

Rule 2: Emotion frames the employee-customer encounter.

"The measurement and management of the employee-customer encounter must acknowledge and incorporate the crucial emotional infrastructure of human behavior and decision making, yielding a concept that extends beyond traditional considerations of employee and customer satisfaction..."

Rule 3: You must measure and manage the employee-customer encounter at a local level.

"Though companies can manage many kinds of organizational activities effectively from the top down, the employee-customer encounter is an intensely local phenomenon..."

Rule 4: We can quantify and summarize the effectiveness of the
employee-customer encounter in a single performance measure

"The interactive effects of employee and customer engagement at the local
level exponentially drive operational and financial performance and
growth..."

Essentially, Gallup makes the point that an employee who has a good "relationship" with his or her employer and feels a part of a broader corporate culture is more likely to create positive experiences for customers at the point of contact.

How to create such a relationship and establish a culture of service? See Rule 5.

Rule 5: Improvement in local HumanSigma performance requires deliberate and active intervention through attention to a combination of transactional and transformational intervention activities.

"Transactional activities, such as action planning, training, and other aggressive interventions, are cyclical interventions that tend to be topical and short-term in focus and to recur regularly. They are designed to help your company do what it already does -- but do it better."

Rule five is a mouthful, but they are saying there are two ways to create the positive employee relationships that lead to positive customer interactions and one of them is to focus on training.

Employees cannot believe in their company if they do not understand what the company stands for. Employees cannot create successful customer experiences if they do not understand the desired customer experience.

McDonalds thrives because they can replicate their customer experience to the smallest detail anywhere in the United States. The food is not gourmet, but they execute it extremely well; it always tastes exactly the same.

Webcasting is an efficient and effective way to deliver the type of training and employee communications that build the consistency and esprit de corps that leads to consistently great interactions with customers.

Superior customer experiences are essential to maintaining differentiation and justifying margins.