Almost all global organizations are aware that there are three key dimensions of value to take into consideration not only to “do” but also “remain” in business. The first one and usually dominant goal of every company is to add value for shareholders. To begin with, is essential for organizations to have an E2E approach about how to achieve this goal. The value cycle for shareholders starts with the pipeline of products and services, which depends on value creation’s ability of the organization encompassing not only new products’ development but also “time to market” to make them available for offering. The second part is to deliver value which includes to create and forecast the demand in order to fulfil it as effectively and timely as possible. While the first part of value cycle is all about enlarging the offer by enriching products and services’ diversity, the second is focus on growing as well as fulfilling the demand by focusing on throughput and capacity creation. As a result of diversity and volume, profit is created and increased for shareholders but then it needs to be capture. Therefore, third part stress is on this by accelerating value for the shareholders instead of thinking only in terms of benefits, focussing in how to increase cash flows. However, is not enough to focus only on value for shareholders, it is also important to do so for customers and employees to ensure business sustainability. Hence, the rising question is if these three value dimensions are completely independent and should be treated separately or if on the contrary, they are interdependent and can be integrated through an E2E approach.
Customers’ experience and journeys
In the first place, it is very important to establish a clear distinction between having a product or a customer centric approach. The most successful companies in designing and delivering great customers’ experiences are of course adopting the later which is basically achieved by “putting themselves into their customer’s shoes”. Once the organization adopts this approach everything changes, because from the customer perspective there is an experience associated to products and services which is built through a “journey”. Along this journey there are several touchpoints and quite few moments of truth that all combined will produce as a result an overall experience. The best way to assess the result of customer’s experience with products and services is to ask them if they would recommend or not others to have the same experience. Since humans are by nature empathetic beings, we are supposed to recommend others only those experiences that at least have fulfilled our expectations. Thus, the best known KPI to measure customer’s experience outcomes is the NPS focussed on “recommendation” instead of “satisfaction” which was related to the former product centric approach.
Employees’ experience and journeys
To begin with employees’ experience follows a path as well as the customers’ ones. Their journey begins with the talent acquisition process which is for many organizations today part of the onboarding. Successful candidates will continue their journey with HR induction which must ensure the cultural fit as well as engagement. Then, the onboarding will continue within each area to ensure competence and enablement to fulfil performance requirements for the role. Moreover, performance management as well as talent development are also moments of truth within the employees’ journey. Other key points to consider are rewards and recognitions through out the whole journey not only to align, promote and reinforce goals, mindset and behaviours respectively but also to make feel the employee well compensated as well as valued for its efforts. Compensation, development and growing opportunities will be part of the journey as well as daily interactions with peers and managers. Although Great Place to Work’s surveys and rankings help organizations to benchmark within the employment market, they are not enough neither to capture employees’ experience nor to measure its evolution therefore an NPS approach is adopted by many organizations to measure employees’ experiences.
Increased, accelerated and sustainable value for shareholders
First and foremost, value cycle’s stages must be integrated for increasing and accelerating value for shareholders. However, without ensuring customers and employees’ value added, the sustainability of shareholders’ value won’t be ensured. Once organizations realize that value’s three dimensions are equally important, they must decide whether to adopt an individual or integrated approach at strategic and operating levels. The integrated approach presents many advantages, for instances by adopting customer centric approach, organizations can further diversify their “pipelines” by increasing experiences’ offer instead of thinking only in terms of products and services. Moreover, customer centric approach opens new possibilities not only of increasing offered but also demanded and delivered value. What is more, customer centric apporach can help organizations to find new innovative ways to capture and accelerate value. Although there are industries such as hospitality in which customers and employees’ experiences are closed related, this is not the case for the majority where relationships between customers’ and employees’ experiences are not so obvious. Nevertheless, employees’ experience is always related with performance and will end up impacting on customers’ experience. Therefore, an effective and efficient onboarding and performance management, is not only important from an employees’ experience point of view but also key to reduce the learning curve and make the best use of talent development resources to balance the workload and tackle performance issues, even more when organizations are dealing with contractors instead of employees. To conclude, I believe it is important to understand the different between “profit” and “value” to not only increase and accelerate the latter for shareholders but also ensure its sustainability by integrating it with value for customers and employees’ as well.
Thanks for Reading.
