I had a really lucky break the other week.
I attended the UK Customer Management Conference as the guest of TMI. Had I received a mailer for this conference I probably wouldn’t have given it a first glance, let alone a second. It turned out to be a real eye-opener in a number of respects.
1) It was a customer service conference but there were more mentions of “brand” than at most of the marketing events I’ve attended.
2) The speakers tended to be more senior within their organisations than most of those at marketing conferences - it was chief execs rather than marketing directors. Given the amount of discussion of “brand” does this perhaps suggest that chief execs view customer service as a more important branding tool than marketing?
3) If there was a general theme to the presentations it was that the quality of an organisation’s customer service is directly proportional to the level of employee engagement within that organisation. In this context, employees generally fall into one of three categories - engaged, not engaged or actively disengaged. Steve Simpson, a highly entertaining Australian speaker from Keystone Management presented some Gallup data which showed the proportion of each type of employee in the average polled organisation in various countries. On average the proportions in each category were about 20:60:20. A sobering thought for anyone running a business, especially when graphically represented as per the German chart shown above.
4) Not surprisingly in this context there was a lot of chat about corporate “culture” and its eventual impact on brand through service delivery. Steve Simpson’s definition of culture was simply and directly “the way things get done around here”. He argued that culture, “the way things get done around here”, is determined not by induction processes and company manuals, but by a combination of UGR’s and UqT’s (Unwritten Ground Rules and Unquestioned Truths).
5) I was really taken with the idea of UGR’s, especially after having seen some examples from companies that Mr Simpson has worked with. UGR’s are the essentials of company life that are picked up by new employees by a process of osmosis and observation. They are incredibly powerful and often have a hugely negative impact on culture, morale, productivity and brand. Some examples were…
“At our meetings there’s no point complaining because nothing will get done.”
“The only time anyone gets spoken to by the boss is when something is wrong.”
6) This all got me thinking about our own business. On the whole agencies are pretty good places to work, although their cultures vary dramatically. Indeed a lot of agencies make a big deal about culture, often leading with a detailed examination of it in their credentials. It’s always struck me that agencies have a high “centre of gravity” when it comes to culture. It’s a big deal, but people’s expectations are so high that it’s also pretty fragile. You don’t need to knock it far off centre for it to “fall over”. Anyway, I started thinking about the UGR’s at Leith…
…and probably the least damaging one that I came up with is “it’s ok to turn up a bit late to internal meetings”. I won’t share the others yet because I want to do some more homework with people here, and maybe include something in my papers for our next board meeting. Watch this space.
7) Overall, spending a day hearing people talk about business and brands from a different perspective is really valuable. Check those conference mailers more carefully!
