|
Listening To Clients
By: Alan Nager
Several months ago, we asked many of you for your
help. We engaged a consulting firm to survey our clients
and our market to align our services and delivery with
your needs. First, let me thank those of you whom we
contacted for graciously taking your valuable time to
participate in the interview process. Your input, as
well as previous feedback from our customer satisfaction
surveys, has helped us shape the direction of Operations
Associates (OA) in the past and for many years to come.
I’d like to share the results. You tell us that OA
has five key differentiators that are important to our
clients and that differentiate us from our competition.
Here are those five differentiators and some questions
you should be asking when hiring any consultant, us or
someone else.
Experienced Professionals
Savvy users of consulting services want to know, “Who
actually will be working on my project?” At OA, our
consultants average over twenty years of industry
experience. We will continue our practice of hiring only
seasoned professionals and will not use entry-level
personnel. The professionals whom you meet in the sales
and planning process will be involved directly with you
throughout your project and will be responsible for
delivering results. Due to our company culture, turnover
among our consultants is rare. For over ten years OA’s
turnover has been less than 5% compared to over 20% for
the consulting industry in general. Our culture supports
longevity.
Success-Based Fees
Clients want more than just talk about increasing value.
OA offers to place our fees at risk on every engagement.
This guarantees that our objectives are aligned with
yours. We’re focused on delivering actual value and
results, not just words. On projects we’ve measured our
return on investment, it is well over 500%.
Turn-key Responsibility
Many consulting companies provide only limited services,
or leave the implementation to the client. We are
enhancing our program management services to integrate
facilities, equipment, technology and people, and offer
you a single point of responsibility without
compromising independence. We will stay with you
throughout the project, from strategic plan through
value creation.
Independent Solutions
Many consulting companies are aligned with equipment or
technology vendors. Others offer “boilerplate”
solutions, ignoring each client’s uniqueness. This
raises the question of whether they are working in your
best interest or their own. Despite this trend in the
consulting world, OA will remain independent of vendors,
freeing us to offer custom solutions.
Award-Winning Customer Satisfaction
We’ve executed nearly 1,000 projects since the company
started. Currently, we measure client satisfaction and
favorably compare with Malcolm Baldrige Award winners.
97.8% of our clients say that we meet or exceed their
expectations. Many of our clients are interested in
learning from these successes. We will place more
emphasis on education to enhance learning opportunities.
We’re getting ready to publish several of educational
booklets in what we’re calling our “Best Practices”
series. More information on these booklets will follow
in later newsletters.
Once again, we thank everyone for helping us grow!
|
Toxic Managers
By: Terry Hollon
Never has the saying “People join companies, but they
leave managers” been more true. In today’s dynamic
business environment, where rapid change is the norm,
the immediate manager has become increasingly critical
to employee satisfaction and, ultimately, retention.
For years, workplace research has consistently
identified the employee’s relationship with his/her
immediate manager as the primary driver of both
satisfaction and retention. While a company’s reputation
as a “good place to work,” product/service quality, pay
and benefits package, and opportunity for advancement
might attract employees, it’s the day-to-day interaction
with their immediate manager that causes them to stay
and remain motivated. Exit interviews conducted with
thousands of employees who voluntarily left their
organizations revealed that a “bad boss,” more recently
dubbed a “toxic” manager, is THE deciding factor in the
decision to leave.
What Is a Toxic Manager?
Most frequently, these managers were described as:
· Unable to drive results through creating a vision
· Ineffective at creating excitement around the work
· Uninvolved in the business
· Ineffective at building teams
· Uncommunicative
· Hogging all the credit
· A poor listener
· A bad “people person”
· Disinterested in me as a person and in my
development
Lack of technical proficiency and “knowing their job”
were rarely mentioned, so it is the interpersonal
competencies that matter most in creating an environment
where employees flourish and indeed stay.
Re-recruiting on the part of the immediate manager is
a primary defense against turnover. Turnover costs
continue to rise, with recent estimates ranging from a
low of 1 ½ times annual compensation, for non-exempt
positions, up to 10 times annual compensation for
executive levels. These estimates may be low, because
they don’t include the cost of disruption to the rest of
the workforce or the opportunity cost of poor service to
clients.
Guest columnist Terry W. Hollon is a Principal with
Targeted Solutions International, a leading human
resources consulting firm. He is an expert in all
aspects of talent selection, development, and retention.
His company is an approved provider to SCACPA. For more
information on how to reduce turnover or other HR
matters, call him at 864-579-7140 or visit the company
website at:
http://www.targetedsolutionsinternational.com. |
