Manage Your Human Sigma

 

Quality” is easy to measure and manage in some contexts, extremely difficult in others. Entrepreneurs, for example, have a pretty good idea of how to judge the manufacturing process that brings forth a fancy new wearable. But what about the retail clerk's attempts to sell the device? Or the call center agent's efforts to help the customer deal with their eccentricities? Organizations are not particularly good at measuring and controlling the quality of these processes, or even most of the work done by non-manufacturing units and firms. read more. webcomputerworld

However, it is important that organizations learn how to measure and manage quality in all types of business environments. In manufacturing, value is created in production. In sales and service organizations, and in many professional service organizations, value is created when an employee interacts with a customer. In fact, the employee-customer meeting point is the factory's sales and service floor. If these organizations are to achieve significant operational and financial improvements, the interaction between employees and customers must be carefully managed.

Quality improvement methods like Six Sigma are extremely useful in manufacturing contexts, where ingredients with predictable properties are repeatedly combined in the same way, but are less useful when dealing with the employee-customer encounter with its volatile human dimensions. . To address this customization problem, we have developed a quality improvement approach that we call Human Sigma. Like Six Sigma, Human Sigma focuses on reducing variability and improving performance. But while Six Sigma applies to processes, systems, and the quality of outcomes, our approach looks at the quality of the employee-customer encounter, weaving together a consistent method for evaluating it and a disciplined process for managing and improving it.

As we developed our thinking about Human Sigma, we came up with several core principles for measuring and managing customer-employee interactions

It's important not to think like an economist or engineer when evaluating employee-customer interaction. It turns out that emotions influence the judgments and behavior of both sides even more than rationality.

The employee-customer encounter needs to be measured and managed locally, as there are large differences in quality at the individual and workgroup levels.

It is possible to arrive at a single measure of effectiveness for the employee-customer encounter; This metric shows a high correlation with financial performance.

To improve the quality of employee-customer interaction, organizations need to deliver short-term transactional interventions (like coaching) and long-term transformational interventions (like changing hiring and promotion processes). In addition, the organizational structure of the company often has to be adjusted so that the employee-customer encounter can be managed holistically.

Human Sigma emerged from a multi-year, research-based initiative aimed at mapping the terrain of the employee-customer encounter. We identify ways to measure encounter effectiveness, examine how these metrics could be better leveraged, and evaluate the benefits that could result from their application. This work was based on direct experience with hundreds of companies and millions of customers and employees. We then tested and validated our findings in 1,979 business units operating across 10 financial services, professional services, retail and distribution companies. The results so far have been extraordinary. The ten companies that all applied best practice principles for managing the employee-customer encounter collectively outperformed their five largest competitors in 2003 by 26% in gross margins and 85% in revenue growth. We cannot guarantee readers comparable results, but we believe that closely monitoring the health of an organization's employee-customer relationships will result in dramatic performance improvements.

Emotions frame the encounter

Six Sigma processes are data driven, rational and analytical. They focus on meeting requirements that are typically functionally specified. Does the product have a defect? Are your parameters within specified manufacturing tolerances? Is it delivered on time? The widespread application of Six Sigma and TQM methods has increased. read more. healthnutritionhints