Employee Understanding – A Chat With Annette Franz (pt. 1)

I recently had the honour of speaking with Annette Franz, Founder and CEO of CX Journey, about her latest book, Employee Understanding. Our wide ranging chat will be spread over two fascinating posts.

BM: Why Employee Understanding now? What prompted you to write the book? And how does it complete the trilogy alongside your first two books, Customer Understanding and Built to Win.

AF: I’ve actually had this book in my head since I wrote Customer Understanding. And I thought, “I can just take customer understanding and go through the entire book and just change wherever it says ‘customer’ to ‘employee’. That would make sense.” But that was 2019. And over the last couple of years, we’ve started to think about EX a little differently. And especially since I wrote Built to Win, which was focused on culture. It’s a critical topic now because I don’t think a lot of people realise that the employee experience drives customer experience, and they’ve told me as much. So, writing Employee Understanding now is all about that about getting that message out there that we need to really take the time to understand our employees and make sure they have a great experience so that customers have a great experience.

In terms of the trilogy, Customer Understanding was a natural to start because I had spent the majority of my time doing that type of work. But the other two books, Built To Win and Employee Understanding, deal with critical pillars of customer experience management. If you don’t have leadership commitment and you don’t have the right culture in place, the customer understanding work is going to get lost. And if you if you don’t listen to your employees and understand them and make sure they have a great experience, then customers won’t have a great experience either.

BM: Just off script here, but people tend to put you in a box when it comes to CX and EX. You’re either a CX person or an EX person, but when it comes to understanding a group of people and then designing an experience for them, the skills are completely transferable between customers and employees. Right?

AF: Absolutely. Back when I started my career at JD Power & Associates, I was working on the custom research side.  I would go meet with clients, and I would say, “Why don’t we incorporate employee listening, employee satisfaction, employee loyalty into this?”, and they would say, “We’ll listen to employees later.” And here we are – it’s much, much later, and they’re still not doing it! But you’re absolutely right: the work is transferable. It’s the same work that we have to do for partners, vendors, franchisees, anyone that is in your ecosystem.

BM: You’ve said employee experience is the foundation of customer experience – a sentiment I completely agree with. Why do you think so many companies still fail to act on the connection? And what do you think is the cost of that oversight?

AF: I’ve heard so many leaders tell me as we’re having these conversations, “Thank you for telling me that. I didn’t know that!” But for those who do look at employee experience, they tend to create separate strategies: employee experiences over here, and customer experiences over here, and for whatever reason, the two don’t talk to each other. When I go and build out a governance structure for a CX organisation, I will have the CEO, and then I’ll have the executive sponsors for CX and the executive sponsors for EX at the same level working side by side, hand in hand. I think too many folks view them as separate strategies. Also, they really haven’t built a culture that puts people first. So that goes up to the CEO and the leadership team to deliberately design a culture that puts people first and acknowledge that if we put people first and we take the time to do the things that make sure that they have a great experience, that we’re going to have great business outcomes.

Sadly, too, I think that often people are just not a priority. I feel that from the companies that my kids have worked at, for example, that the employees just aren’t a priority. It’s truly profits before people and metrics before people. And it’s embarrassing.

And I’ll just give you one more, because there’s a lot of reasons. I would say that there’s really no visibility into the employees, what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. And so I think a lot of times executives are so far removed from the front line – and it could also somebody in the back office – that they miss out on the friction for employees who don’t have the right tools, or training, or policies that are broken or outdated, or whatever. They miss the friction that’s created for employees that then translates directly onto customers.

BM: What do you think are the critical things to do around EX generally? I once worked for a company where a lot of thought had gone into their onboarding process. It really was exceptional. So, after the first week I felt great about the company and was highly motivated. What do you think are the critical things to be doing when you are designing an experience for an employee?

AF: Yeah, I think you make a great point. So obviously, do the work listening to find out what matters to your employees and then design experiences around that. But first impressions to me are lasting impressions so design a great candidate experience. I think too many people forget that the candidate experience leads directly to the employee experience. And if the person isn’t hired and it doesn’t lead to the employee experience, it could very well lead to the customer experience because as a candidate, I might actually be buying from your brand. You’ve got to get it right one way or the other. So, I would start there. And I can tell you right now that experience is a mess.

First impressions for employees are so critical and it’s the same for customers. If you think about customer success and the whole onboarding process, and how we need to make sure that we understand desired outcomes, we need to do the same thing for employees. As a matter of fact, somebody made a comment on a Linkedin post of mine last week. He said, “Maybe we need employee success.” And I said, “I don’t see why not!” Think about that: the interviewing, the hiring, that whole process, and then building out a great onboarding and understanding the difference between orientation and onboarding. Because orientation, usually it’s a one-day thing, right? It’s like, “Here’s your paperwork, fill it out, sign it, do these things.” But onboarding is really more about integrating the employee into the company and having a really great understanding of what their role is, how they’re impacting customer and business outcomes, how they’re working with other departments, those kinds of things. So, I think that’s a really critical piece of it.

And offboarding, too. If somebody leaves your employment, they could be potential customers, or they could potentially want to come back at some point and be a rehire too. So that’s important. There are so many pieces of the employee experience that we want to make sure we get right. But do the work to do it right. Listen to them, get the feedback, develop the personas, map the journeys – really understand where the pain points are and where the friction is, what problems they’re trying to solve.

And here’s another good one – we don’t talk about this a lot, and I put it in the book Employee Understanding, but when you bring in new technology and you think it’s going to improve employee experience by making their lives easier, 99% of the time it makes things more painful for them! I mean, we don’t ask them, “What problems are you trying to solve?” or “What’s taking up all your time?” or “Where can we reduce friction or inefficiencies?” Somebody has a harebrained idea and says, “Everybody else is buying this technology. We need to have this technology too!” And so they go and get it, and they implement it. And I’ve talked to so many employees who have said, “I didn’t get trained properly on it. Nobody asked me why I needed this or what it would do.” So, that’s an important part of the employee experience that I think that a lot of leaders miss.

BM: Yeah, 100%! And processes, as well. When organisations bring a new process in, they don’t necessarily get rid of an old process. The new one comes in over the top, and it’s just another thing to do.

AF: Yeah, they don’t look at how they all weave together, and that’s why, when we do the journey mapping, that service blueprint is such an important part of that, because then we can take a look at the people, the tools, the systems, the processes behind the scenes, that all mesh together to create that customer experience.

BM: Have you ever significantly changed a culture? Have you ever walked into a client who just had like a terrible culture and made changes that improved it? It may be that your engagement with that company ended, but you kept an eye on them, and over the years saw real improvements.

AF: Definitely. When I first start meeting with a client, I interview the leadership team, some employees, and a sampling of customers. And when I’m talking to the leadership team, I’m trying to get an assessment of everything: their alignment, their commitment to the work that they’ve hired me to do, but I’m also doing an assessment on the culture and the employee experience and the customer experience.

And what has ended up happening with these organisations that I’ve kept in touch with where we’ve made significant changes to the culture is that we saw a significant reduction in the leadership team too because they weren’t aligned. You might have seven leaders, but if three of them aren’t on board with what the CEO is trying to do when he hired me, then I need to tell him (it’s usually a “him”) and I think he knows it but has to hear it from a third party. As consultants, they don’t want us to be “yes people.” They want us to tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

BM: They want to know their blind spots.

AF: Exactly! Being that affirmation of “you have an issue on the leadership team. And if you want this transformation to work, these people have to go.” Several times I’ve seen the replacement of several members of the leadership team because they were not in line with where the CEO wanted to go. And then also getting the right people on the bus – that’s a huge thing, too. When I hear from employees when I’m doing those interviews that there’s a misalignment among the employees, or there’s just toxic employees, those usually get resolved too. Just that alone will often create this huge shift. So again, long winded answer, but yes, it always starts with the leadership team, and then it also requires addressing the people who are toxic to the culture you’re trying to create.

BM: Do you ever change an organisation’s values?

AF: Typically, I don’t change the values. A lot of times, companies already have the right values but I have worked with clients where we’ve added one because we wanted to be able to address a certain aspect of the customer experience or people first. Like I said, culture is core values plus behaviours. If you go and define those behaviours, and you do that through the lens of the people, whether it’s interacting with your fellow employees or interacting with customers, then usually you don’t have to change the values unless they’re really lacking.

One example of where we did add a value happened a couple of years ago. We added Customer Trust, because there was such a such a mess there with my client’s front line. And it was only the frontline employees – the people who interacted with customers – where they just butted heads with customers constantly. So, we added that value of Customer Trust; we defined it, made sure everybody understood what it meant and how it was going to be operationalised. And I checked in with them six months later, and my client said that it was night and day in terms of how their frontline were interacting with customers and with each other. So, we made a big difference there.

BM: Brilliant. In terms of employee surveys, there’s a lot of checking the box. How can companies evolve from just collecting feedback to genuinely acting on it?

AF: I think the big thing goes back to culture – having that listening and feedback culture and listening in a variety of ways. Don’t just do surveys. I think people have gotten so tired of surveys. Listen differently, whether it’s an Employee Advisory Board, Customer Advisory Board, or one-on-one interviews. It’s having conversations. It’s voice of the customer through the employee. It’s doing executive round tables and having executives take turns going out and talking to and listening to employees, and customers, too, and getting them to a point where they’re immersed in a day in the life of the employee or a day in the life of the customer and hearing how painful it is for them.

And I have to tell you that with the journey mapping work that I’ve done over the years, anytime there were executives in the room, and that was quite often, they would be like,  “Oh, my gosh! I didn’t know that we did that to our employees,” or “I didn’t know we did that to our customers.” So, use feedback to get them engaged and get them involved and get them committed to taking it seriously. Then they’re going to act.

Going back to surveys, I’ve also asked at the end of employee surveys, for example, “Do you believe that your leadership team will take this feedback constructively and do something with it?” And most of the time people say, “No.” Rightly so. But when I ask that, it’s a kick in the pants for the leadership team. And they’re like, “We can’t have people thinking this. That’s not the legacy that we want to leave.”

In part 2 of our conversation, we cover AI, remote working, the great resignation, and Annette’s plans for her next book.