Read the full article over at Customer Experience Magazine.

When a business is underperforming, the board members will instigate a change of management to bring in a new strategic vision, culture or skillset.  So why should it be any different for English football? In this instance, it looks as though The FA will be going with more of the same…

The popular favourite

On a cold January evening earlier this year, Harry Redknapp was cleared of tax evasion at Southwark Crown Court. Meanwhile 14 miles away, the underperforming England manager, Fabio Capello, was resigning from his post.

The immediate favourite for the job was the charismatic Harry Redknapp, backed by fans and journalists alike. It seemed only a matter of time before he was appointed to lead his country into the summer tournament and beyond.

Two choices

So how do you get the most out of talented yet disengaged and underperforming players? At the moment an international stint is seen as a chore – the players don’t want to leave their club teams. This needs to change; the employees need to feel engaged once more.

Harry Redknapp, often referred to as a ‘man’s man’ seemed to be be the right manager to change things up and inject new life into the England team. On the other side you had Roy Hodgson, more straight laced and disciplined.

A challenging role

With the high profile England job comes great scrutiny. Like any corporation in the public eye, a change at the top can cause a media storm. When underperforming companies opt for new guidance, stakeholders will be looking at the next financial reports to judge the impact of the change. Is the company going in the right direction?

The England job is much the same, with the media happy to build up a manager one month, only to knock him down the next. England fans are notorious for jumping on this bandwagon and have become increasingly disillusioned with the national team in recent years. Some blame the manager and some the players. It is fair to say this criticism is not unfounded; the England team have not reached the semi-final of a major tournament since 1996. In 2008 they didn’t qualify, and 2010 was hardly English football’s finest hour.

Optimism for the Euro’s?

We are now in May and this saga has finally come to an end. The decision makers at The FA reached a conclusion and an appointment has been made. However, it was not the ‘Chosen One’, but the safer and cheaper option – the manager with no buyout clause who will not create scandals. After all, there have been enough of these recently…

The choice was made to appoint Roy Hodgson, a manager whose approach is not dissimilar to the outgoing coach Fabio Capello. His tenure cannot be called a success so why replace him with a candidate who has a similar approach?

London City Airport. (Photographer: curimedia)

London City Airport’s real-time flight information Twitter tool (@lcyflightinfo) has resulted in a Twitter and Facebook following that is three times more likely to engage using when compared with other UK and European airports.

Tweeters need only to include the hashtag #flight and the flight number in a mention, to get the status of a flight arriving into or departing from London City Airport. As any change to flight time is updated every 60 seconds, passengers can rest assured that they are receiving the most current and up-to-date information.

Their most recent customer satisfaction scores at have been at an all-time high, with a rating of 8.7 out of 10,  higher than at any other London-based airport.

Matthew Hall, Chief Commercial Officer, London City Airport commented: “The E-Commerce team work tirelessly to communicate with our passengers through the channels of Twitter and Facebook and I applaud their efforts, which are obviously not going unnoticed.”

Our main project requirements

• Repository of information to support learning
• Online activities (quizzes, assignments, etc.) to enhance learning
• Go-to place for delegates to find out dates and locations of events
• Social features to encourage engagement between training sessions
• Customisable / brand-sensitive
• Provide a competitive edge for us / added value for the client

Learning from our Pilot Project with Moodle

Our initial research led us to Moodle as the best solution for us because it met our specification requirements, and was:

• Feature-rich
• Had a strong community of web developers issuing improvements, bugfixes, etc.
• Was customisable
• Open Source, meaning we could afford to invest more time in customisations

After installing a version of the software and customising it lightly to match our branding, Ricky attended a two-day training session to learn more about how we could achieve the greatest impact with its features.  Whilst the training course revealed how powerful the software was, the software felt overly-complex for our needs and a little unintuitive – or ‘clunky’!

With the complexity of the software’s coding and its uninviting documentation, Ricky wasn’t well-equipped to begin customising it heavily.  We decided to stick with it in the short-term and learn as much as we could about how we used it, before seeking an alternative solution.  However, when our Moodle installation suddenly stopped working altogether one day, and we couldn’t repair upgrade to the latest version we were forced to end the Pilot Project and seek another solution – fast.

Finding an alternative – the hybrid solution

Returning to our previous research, the runners-up from the Pilot Project were no more attractive than Moodle.  Luckily, we had just upgraded our main website to a customised version of the Content Management System WordPress, and were impressed with how easy it was to customise to meet the needs of our users, and for us to manage the content.

My research led me to some people who had attempted to integrate LMS features with WordPress, including the work of Stas Sușcov, creator of the Scholarpress Courseware plugin.  Encouraged by the fact that there was an active group of Courseware users, and Stas’ continued support and development for the solution, I installed a copy and had a play around.

Whilst the functionality was great, we didn’t feel that the horizontal tabs provided the most modern user experience, the language didn’t quite match our own, and there were still a lot of buttons on screen.

A little more browsing led us to the Fishbook theme by Michael Kuhlman, based loosely on Facebook’s user interface – that hundreds of millions of people are familiar with!

The hybrid solution:

• WordPress v3.3.1 – Basic foundation for the site
• BuddyPress v1.5.4 – Adds social features
• ScholarPress Courseware 0.9.5 – Adds LMS features
• Fishbook theme v1.2 – Starts to get the site looking like Facebook
• BP Group Management v0.5.2 – Allows us to ‘enrol’ users in courses

So, now it was time to get customising…!

Our main customisations

1. Reduced the number of buttons in the main menu to three: Newsfeed, Courses and Help.

2. Removed all horizontal sub-navigation menus and filters.  The screenshot below shows the Newsfeed screen when a user first logs in.

3. Simplified the course menu to a horizontal list of just five options: Modules, Events, Pre- and Post-work, Contacts and Forum.

4. Adjusted the language to match our own, across the site:

• ‘Groups’ to ‘Courses’
• ‘Lectures’ to ‘Modules’
• ‘Schedules’ to ‘Events’
• ‘Assignments’ to ‘Pre- and Post-work’
• ‘Friends’ to ‘Contacts’ (and removed the Friends functionality)
• ‘Activity’ to ‘Newsfeed’

5. Switched to a single column of content on each page, giving a wider area for things like the event calendar.

6. Simplified the administration options, to make it easy for our trainers to update all the content!

Planned future enhancements

As with everything Accelerator does, we never stand still – and already have some ideas for the future…!

• Turn back on the Inbox for Private Messaging between users
• Get the Notifications feed working
• Tweaking some more of the language
• Improved Internet Explorer compatibility
• Alphabetise the list of modules within a course

Although the manufacturer of fabrics, tubing and tapes boasts annual revenues of $3 billion and a workforce of more than 9,500, it remains a privately-held enterprise.  But, does W. L. Gore prosper because of its unique corporate culture or despite it?

Distributed leadership and autonomy

The company describes itself as, “a team-based, flat lattice organisation that fosters personal initiative.”  All company functions are assigned to teams, and direct communication and individual innovation is encouraged among team members.  W. L. Gore avoids traditional labels, referring to those in its ranks as ‘associates,’ rather than ‘employees.’

The careers of these largely-autonomous associates are guided by ‘sponsors’ rather than ‘managers’ who assist them in identifying opportunities and understanding team objectives.  Team leaders evolve into their leadership roles organically - new recruits haven’t yet built influence within the business, and there is no assumed power derived from job titles.  Peer review means that associates have to be collaborative, as well as effective.

So autonomous are the company’s associates that Bill Gore’s vision for his company placed on them the single restriction that they consult other associates “before undertaking actions that could impact the reputation of the company.”

Results

W. L. Gore credits this novel organizational strategy with its industry-leading levels of employee satisfaction and retention. Perhaps the best evidence of the success of this strategy is that, for the last 15 consecutive years, the company has appeared in Fortune Magazine’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” list.

Company revenues have almost doubled since Alan Deutschman claimed in 2004:  “Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W. L. Gore & Associates.”  This is, of course, despite the challenges faced by the world economy in the intervening years.

The company’s most famous product, the miracle fabric Gore-Tex, did not result from a hierarchical decision to compete in the outer-wear arena, but was instead an outgrowth of autonomous research into alternative formulations for coating and insulating wire.  Had that associate not enjoyed the confidence instilled by Bill Gore’s supportive company culture, the world may never have known Gore-Tex.

While W. L. Gore might have prospered under a more traditional corporate structure, it would not have been as remarkably successful as under Bill Gore’s peculiar brand of organisational innovation that has guided its efforts for more than 50 years.

For birds the group objective could be flying south for the winter by following basic conventions: move in the same direction as the swarm, remain close to your neighbours – but avoid collisions with them!

Organisations can benefit from these sorts of conventions too. FedEx once ran a powerful but simple ad campaign: “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight”. Whilst aimed at customers, it created a clear, collective responsibility amongst its employees to ensure the objective was achieved.

Executives are often paid big money to make big decisions, however the future of an organisation depends on implementing their decisions, with the ‘swarm’ working towards a shared vision. This culture does not happen overnight, but can only be developed through shared organisational intelligence.  What implicit conventions does your organisation have to ensure everyone can move in the same direction?

Article inspired by Steve Hearsum.

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Heiko Voigts, manager of technical training at Colt Technology Services, shares his experience of a project up-skilling a team from ‘back office’ to deliver frontline customer service…

Pace: Colt has an interesting history, starting in the 1990s as City of London Telecommunications, and now focusing on IT and networking services for enterprises. How has the organisation dealt with such change?

Heiko Voigts: More than two years ago Colt embarked on a journey which is changing it from a traditional Telecommunications company, towards what we call the Information Delivery Platform, which expresses the integration of IT and Network services.

This change in strategy has been accompanied by a redrawn Business Model. This has been by far the most significant change I have experienced in my career. The natural spectrum of reactions to such a change could be observed, but now even the sceptics have realised the only way is forward.

P: How did Colt become involved with Accelerator?

HV: For years, we had the typical situation of realising some process isn’t working, and the reaction of managers calling for training. Recently, the Learning & Development team moved from Operations to the Business Services Unit (BSU), meaning that we are an internal service provider to the business.

So those times are over – we are pro-actively conducting training needs analysis for all areas in Colt and these are based in large part on process documentation and the tasks and skills it foresees for a given team.

We continue to outsource training that does not belong to the core competencies of our team, which is where Accelerator’s capabilities were required.

P: The ‘ProCom’ project involved the Order Management team moving from ‘back-office’ roles to frontline customer-facing ones. How did Accelerator’s training help with this change?

HV: Accelerator played a significant role in helping the teams make this transformation – both in preparing them for customer-facing tasks and in adding valuable insights into their own team dynamics. One participant who I met in Germany told me she had “never thought of communication in this way before”.

P: What lessons have you learned from the project to date? Have there been any early indicators of success?

HV: During the project, I observed that those managers who communicated in a timely way, face to face and with sensitivity had the least issues.

The project has within one year achieved customer satisfaction results climbing from around 6.2 to 7.8, and rising.

Whilst we were impressed by the response in general, we would have preferred to have seen the apology at the beginning of the email, and more of a commitment to addressing the ‘people side’ of the complaint rather than focusing on processes and technology.

A complaint is a gift: Starts off with a positive ‘thank you’, rather than a defensive tone, showing that they recognise complaints as providing an opportunity to improve.

Thank you for contacting us about the lack of information on the dot matrix indicators at Paddington station on the Hammersmith & City line.

The explanation: Not making excuses, just explaining why you had the experience you did. Also shows that they understand their own business.

We are aware that we have limited service information on the dot matrix indicators on this line at present. Under the present system on some sections of the line we are not able to provide train destinations until the trains are in the vicinity of the station and at others we are only able to state the destination of the next train or no information at all. Where this information is provided, the present system is based on the sequence of trains running and can be affected by alterations to the service pattern which is not always immediately updated.

Managing expectations: It’s important not to go overboard in your promises on whether / how quickly the problem will be addressed.

Unfortunately, this will remain an occasional problem until our signals are upgraded and new information systems are introduced.

What next: Shows an interest in improving the experience, and explains how they will get there.

New dot matrix indicators being installed as part of the Tube Upgrade will receive information directly from the signals and trains. This new signalling system will be installed as part of the Tube Upgrade programme but will take several years to complete.

Further information: Keeps the email shorter, whilst offering the option to soothe someone who’s still not satisfied with the information provided.

You can find out more information about this on the following website: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/projectsandschemes/18070.aspx

Helping the customer help themselves: Sometimes the best solution is providing customers with the tools to help themselves, giving them empowerment of their own experience. In this case, it’s especially helpful as the problem won’t be resolved for some time.

However, if you can access the internet via your mobile phone you may find our online live departure board information helpful and this can be found at the following link: www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/departureboards. By doing this you’ll be able to see when the trains are due at your station.

Keeping it relevant: The representative has obviously checked the specific station that was complained about, to make sure the advice provided is accurate and relevant.

Of course, you can always ask our staff if you find yourself waiting longer than expected. There are ‘Help Points’ you can use for this purpose at most of our stations including Paddington.

The apology: Simple, personal, and better late than never!

I would like to apologise for the inconvenience you were caused on this occasion. Please contact me again if you need any help in the future.

Some amusing examples of such patronising promotions in the B2B arena include: “a free (!) review of your website search results (I get congratulated with at least five of those a week), or a lucky invitation to an ‘exclusive,’ free (!) luncheon and employee benefits seminar.”

The following pragmatic paragraph provides a good summary of the article: “If you would like a customer to do something — make a purchase, consider an offer, participate in a survey — then tell it like it is. Make the offer, extend the invitation, ask for her business. By all means be creative, be a classy and honest marketer. But don’t pretend you’re doing her a selfless favor; don’t use phony language that insults her intelligence.”

The full article can be found at: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-57363571/4-signs-youre-about-to-insult-my-intelligence/?tag=nl.e713

1. Have integrity. Be honest, accurate and let people know where they stand.
2. Respect others. Don’t attempt to be ‘efficient’ with people.
3. Be transparent, erring on the side of disclosure. Tell the truth in a way people can verify.
4. Fix your errors. Say sorry, don’t cover things up, and don’t let pride stop you from doing the right thing.
5. Be loyal. Give credit to others. Represent those who can’t speak for themselves, whilst respecting their privacy. Trust those who have earned it.
6. Deliver. Validate expectations of you, and renegotiate them if necessary.
7. Improve continuously. Be a constant learner, and develop feedback systems.
8. Practice accountability. Be clear on how you will hold yourself and others accountable, and keep from passing blame.
9. Listen. Don’t presume you have all the answers – or all the questions.
10. Keep your promises.

Don’t…

1. Rely on what’s worked before. It’s easy to under-estimate the role of chance in your successes. Instead, acknowledge that circumstances are always going to change.
2. Mix up your personal interests with your responsibilities to others. Your passion and the results you deliver are not a license to do so. Instead, exercise humility.
3. Bury your head in the sand. Instead, confront the real issues and invite scrutiny from others.
4. Make excuses for not delivering. (See ‘Deliver’ above)
5. Under-estimate obstacles and over-estimate benefits.

Inspired by:

• http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/
• http://www.coveylink.com/documents/13-Behaviors-Handout-CoveyLink.pdf