What does Digital Transformation mean? If we ask this several people, we get entire different answers. In it’s core it’s not about digital, it’s about the customer. We need to be more and more customer centric… but how can a company be customer centric if their employees have company targets (e.x. sales people have revenue targets in their contract)?
Employees needs to have common goals instead of individual goals to work together and be strong together to deliver a great customer experience. Goals needs to be changed into customer goals / targets. Digital Transformation requires a change management which needs to involve HR.
Digital Transformation requires a change in mindset and the right people. But how do we get the right people?
If we look into the job market we often do not see companies who feel responsible for their employees and employees who do not feel responsible for the company they work for. Very often people started their education within a company and left the same company when they retired.
50 years back the relationship between a company and an employee was totally different. Today it’s just dog eat dog, everyone cares only about himself. How can such an company and such employees be customer centric?
Companies are talking about employer branding and they are proud that they have an own gym, fruit for free, an own child care and so on…. But looking into the companies often they don’t really cares about trust, respect and loyalty. This starts at the very beginning of an application. There is no contact person named in a job description, no phone number, no e-mail… even an global e-mail like hr@. If you send your application through this company who is awarded for employer branding you get an automated mail and then nothing for 3 or 4 weeks. Very often you get an automated message saying “if your profile is interesting we will get back to you”. What if it’s not interesting? a candidate spends time to send the application and a company tells them that they do not have time to send a short cancellation mail? That is disrespectful and shows how a company is driven… not employee and not customer driven at the end of the day.
If an employee is very committed and he did a great job with an amazing success… he expects that he will get the recognition for it, the recognition on a non-financial level. If this recognition is missing he is quickly frustrated and the next time he will not work that hard for the next success.
So we need to rethink the customer centric approach. First we need to do our homework internally how we act together, then we can go out with our passion for what we are doing and focus on our customer. It’s a shame that we need to talk about this, that our society has changed in this wrong direction. So this is the situation today:
We have three players:
- Company
- Employee
- Customer
Everyone sees their own goals… let’s change this and focus only on the goals of the other two players.
- Companies are self focused
- Employees are self focused
- Everyone is financial focused and not customer focused
We need a different culture of work. Don’t name it “New Work”, there is nothing new we need… we just need to go 50 years or so back and remember old values and culture.
Let’s throw the buzzword “Employer Branding”, with all the goodies companies offer, into the bin and replace this with trust, respect and loyalty. Let’s do it like 50 years ago.
The goodies a company can keep, but this is nothing to be proud of if trust, respect and loyalty is missing and employees are just numbers and resources. If this change is done we can start changing to a customer centric driven company. It’s about Vision, Change Management, IT and Communication what is needed to grow to a customer centric organization.
Whats next? after we have reached the right level of culture and values with the right customer mindset? Have a look into these article:
