Now is the time to prepare your business for the recession. In addition to the typical strategies of cost-cutting and cash flow management, add culture-building. A healthy, effective, and resilient company culture can help you not just survive, but actually thrive during an economic downturn. In my new Smartbrief on Leadership video, I explain how […]
I’m not a designer so I don’t have any expertise on this, but from the perspective of brand leadership. infusing your office design with your brand seems an effective way to turn your office into a magnet, inspiration, and guide for employees. Plus, when I reached out to my go-to expert on all things office […]
The age-old question – which is more important, customers OR employees – is a misguided, and potentially dangerous one. As a business leader, you shouldn’t prioritize one group over another. Instead, you should link employees and customers. One way to connect employees and customers is to use cultural tenets that are relevant and important to […]
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently referred to Meta employees in a new way: Metamates. Is this a good idea? Should you use a coined name to refer to your employees? The poll I fielded on LinkedIn yielded a definitive answer: It depends. 28% supported the practice of made-up names for employees; 32% voted against it; […]
The problem at Amazon is not simply that its culture has gone awry; more importantly, it has become disconnected from the company’s brand. Amazon’s brand has always been grounded in its aspiration of becoming “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.” And its leaders have used the organization’s core values, “Leadership Principles”, to guide the company in service […]
Customer Experience (CX) maturity models are used by many companies to guide, measure, and improve their performance on CX. You need a similar tool to empower Employee Experience (EX) excellence. I suggest an EX Maturity Model that incorporates the 10 key building blocks of EX: Strategic clarity – clear vision and strategy for EX EX:CX […]
Customer personas — models that represent different groups of customers – have been a valuable tool in customer experience (CX) design. Now it’s time to apply the approach to employees and employee experience (EX) design. Employees personas can be used to develop completely new EX designs that bridge the gaps caused by a hybrid workforce, […]
Your Human Resources and Compliance/Risk/Ethics departments might not be the first to come to mind when you think about culture-building, they can – and should – influence it significantly. And they are only two of the many groups within your organization that must be engaged in culture-building. As a leader, you may spearhead the definition […]
How did Airbnb manage to recover so quickly from the Covid-19 pandemic? CEO Brian Chesky and the leaders at Airbnb focused on a few key priorities: the core business — they streamlined ancillary offerings and shored up their home rentals business customer emotions — they assessed what customers were feeling and went to great lengths […]
Back in early 2018, I wrote “2018 Will Be the Year of Employee Experience.” Little did I know that only a couple years later, it would already be “The Year of Employee Experience 2.0”! Yes, there’s a new employee experience mandate (EX). The COVID-19 pandemic transformed so much so quickly, it’s only natural that it […]