Understand and manage employee satisfaction: morale and engagement influence productivity, customer satisfaction, employee retention…

Need to measure many aspects of employee satisfaction:

• Leadership, culture, organization climate, job activities
• Baseline satisfaction levels
• Identify actions to improve commitment and trust

Don’t just measure, improve, and be seen to improve:

• Assign resources to act on the measurement
• Results and actions must be demonstrated back to employees

How do you measure it ?

Employee surveys

Consider using a third party to allow confidential feedback Surveys: local or organization wide Formal or unstructured meetings: listen for feedback One-on-one meetings: build relationships to encourage feedback Review sickness and attrition data: look for trends and changes Staff-driven metrics: allow staff to submit morale indicators

Satisfied employees lead to satisfied customers, consider: Who is the sponsor ? What is the purpose ? What do you want to know ? Sampling or all employees ? Methods of data collection (paper survey, interview, online, …) ? Attributes to be measured ? Satisfaction, retention, communications Understanding goals and vision Trust and relationships Competitiveness of salary and benefits Job structure, training, advancement, performance management Nominal (qualitative) or ordinal (quantitative, scaled)

 

1. Working to a customer-oriented mindset An approach to sales and customer‐relations in which staff focus on helping customers meet long‐term needs and wants: Place customers at the core of business decisions Observe and anticipate the wishes and needs of customers Care about customer experience and continually enhance it Don’t just create products and services, create a positive impact on customers Every customer is unique, understand their individual needs and wants Focus on value

How to create a customer‐oriented strategy:

• Create a customer value proposition (CVP): balance benefits and loyalty
• Map the customer/user experience journey: consider all touchpoints
• Recruit customer-friendly staff
• Treat employees well: happy employees make happy customers
• Train/coach staff on the customers, products, and industries they support
• Walk the talk. Senior managers should lead by example
• Listen to the voice of the customer (VoC) – surveys, meetings, etc.
• Use lots of feedback data: consider using a balanced scorecard of metrics
• Empower staff: give them the authority to solve customer issues

2. Positive Communications

Routine, repetitive IT work is rapidly moving to automation

Interaction and communication still relies on people: communication is needed with customers, suppliers, colleagues, staff…

All communication: creates opinions of the value of the team, ITSM, and the service provider

Consider how to manage and coordinate communication: small team to communicate about projects, service desk agents to communicate about incidents...

Characteristics

Communication principles

Starts with listening Is efficient, responsive, professional, effective and HUMAN Establishes positive relationships Reduces problems and stress Recognises intellectual and emotional needs Promotes trust, empathy, and shared goals Identifies issues and improvement opportunities Includes emotional, business and technical responses Is timely, based on appropriately set expectations Is simple, short, relevant, limited to what is needed, and free of jargon

Communication is a two-way process We are all communicating all the time Timing and frequency matters There is no single method of communication that works for everyone The message is in the medium

 

3. Workforce Planning

Purpose: the purpose of the workforce and talent management practice is to enable organization, leaders, and managers to focus on creating an effective and actionable people strategy (analysing the current workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying the gap between the present and the future, and implementing solutions) so that the organization can achieve its mission, goals, and strategic objectives.

Workforce is arguably the most important asset of most organizations

Identify required roles, and associated knowledge, skills, attitudes...:

• To keep the organization running
• To exploit emerging technologies
• To provide leadership and organizational change capabilities
• To position the organization for future success and growth

Strategies for recruiting, retaining, developing, and managing employees

Understanding how human resources will be used to meet business goals

Numbers of staff as well as skills and competence

At multiple levels, from whole organization to a single project

For ALL capabilities: New and changed services, support, etc.

Workforce and talent management:

• Plan: understand current and future skills requirements, and staff turnover
• Improve: continually adapt to meet evolving business needs
• Engage: understand and forecast changing demand for services and how this will impact workforce
• Design and transition: understand competences needed for Agile, DevOps, etc. define training plans
• Obtain/build: training, mentoring, succession planning, recruiting or sourcing skills
• Deliver and support: measure how knowledge, abilities and attitude impact practices

People’s competence can be T-shaped, pi-shaped, comb-shaped:

Go back to ITIL 4 Managing Professional Certification Course: Create, Deliver and Support (CDS) to finish this chapter or to the main page ITIL 4 Managing Professional Certification Course.