Annette Franz: Employee Understanding

Jason S. Bradshaw: The fastest way to see the future of your customer experience is to look in the mirror of your culture because every frustration your employee feels eventually shows up in the lives of your customers.

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Jason S. Bradshaw: Welcome back to Chats with Jason. I'm your host, Jason S. Bradshaw, and today we're joined by someone who has built her career helping leaders fix culture so their people thrive and their customers win.

Annette Franz is the founder and CEO of CX Journey, Inc. A globally recognized thought leader and the author of three game-changing books on customer and employee experience. Her newest released Employee Understanding introduces a three pillar framework - culture, insight, and empathy - that shows leaders how to design great employee experiences and drive real business success.

Annette Franz: Thank you so much for having me. I am so looking forward to our conversation. Yay!

Jason S. Bradshaw: You've been shaping conversations around customer and employee experience for decades, and your work has influence for a long time. Sounds better than decades, and your work has helped leaders all around the world. So let's dive in to some questions.

Annette Franz: All right. Let's do it.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So you've been in CX since before it had that name just like me. We've seen the practice of customer experience and the profession of it evolve over time, but looking back, what first sparked your passion for this work and how did it evolve into a focus on culture and employee experience?

And [00:03:00] to answer your question about culture and employee experience, it just, it all evolved as I moved on from J.D. Power and Associates and went over to the client side and worked at Mattel for a little while, and then came back to the vendor side and was in some consulting leadership roles, it became very apparent to me very quickly that if we don't have: A - leadership on board, and B - the right environment to the work that needs to be done and for people to understand what that work is and what it means and why we're doing it and how to do it and all of that, things are gonna slow down really quickly.

Jason S. Bradshaw: I think without naming names, we are probably find later still hasn't arrived for some of those.

Annette Franz: For a lot of 'em. Yes. Absolutely.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And so you often say that fix the culture. Fix the outcome.

Annette Franz: Yes.

Jason S. Bradshaw: You've touched a little bit on why culture is the foundation of delivering great customer experiences, but for a leader who senses that their culture is broken, what's the very first step they should take to start turning things around out?

The first question is, how would you define your culture? Like just keywords. I don't need paragraphs. I don't need big stories. I just want words. What are the key words that would describe your culture?

And then the next thing I ask is, what's the glue that holds the business together? What's the glue that holds your company together? And then everybody, as soon as I ask that, everybody goes, oh, that's a great question.

But then I ask, what's the unglue? What breaks the company apart? Just those three questions alone, and especially the last two, are huge pieces of information that really opened the doors to, oh my goodness, we didn't even know this was happening. Or, oh wow, we didn't realize we had this many employees who feel this way about the culture.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I love the question around about the glue and really how people would respond to that. I'm thinking that the answers would be from A to Z and that really would give you that insight quickly into the culture.

Annette Franz: Absolutely, a lot of times it's the people, it's the teamwork, it's the collaboration, it's those kinds of things. But then when you go and you ask the unglue, you find that, yeah, people, collaboration, teamwork, that's all well and good, but the unglue, there are definitely some undercurrents there that are totally go counter to teamwork and collaboration, and those are the kinds of things that you need to dig deeper into and really understand what's happening there.

Annette Franz: Hey, you talked about my decades, so we're good.

Jason S. Bradshaw: So it's only fair. It's only fair.

So yeah, a couple of decades ago I was sitting in an audience as a team member of a company, and they were, they had gone through, I think the third acquisition in as many years or third takeover. And so a new fresh leadership group had come in and they were telling us about how they'd just been on this amazing executive retreat and that we've got five new company values. And the first one was customer experience, and the second one was employee engagement. And I have no idea what the other three were. But I remember to this day when it got to Q&A, someone stood up in the audience and said, why are employees number two on the list?

And I don't necessarily think that particular organization was out of step with, even today, a lot of companies say customer first, but you argue putting employees more first.

Annette Franz: Yeah, and I wish I could take credit for that term, but Hal Rosenbluth of Rosenbluth international, the travel agency many years ago. And there's a book too, it's called Customers Come Second, and in that book he talks about if we wanna put customers first, we need to put employees more first. And basically what we need leaders to understand or recognize is that the importance of the employees, right? The employee experience is really a strategic imperative and not just a nice to have, right? What we need them to understand is that without employees, we have no one who's going to design, build, sell, implement, deliver, install, service, all these things for your product, and deliver that customer experience. So this is why it's so important that we say employees more first. Yeah, you can put customers first, but then you've gotta put employees more first because you have to have that [00:09:00] realization that the employees are the heart of the business. And they are the reason that you have something to deliver to your customers and are able to deliver an experience to your customers. And so I think there's a real big disconnect. First of all, there's a lot of disconnects there, right? Because I think a lot of leaders don't even appreciate the fact that customers are the reason that we're in business, right?

Let's it goes back to that old mantra, stakeholder value or whatever they have in their heads that why we're in business, when I think it's so important that they recognize that we need to take care of our people first, and people is both employees and customers. And if we can make that connection, and we can take a look at employee experience and customer experience and how they go hand in hand, everybody's gonna win, but the business will definitely win.

So I say the culture is that precursor for a great employee experience. Healthy culture, healthy and great employee experience. And then employees benefit, they have great outcomes. That means that customers are also going to reap the benefits from that. And in the end the business will have some great out outcomes as well. So culture really is a foundation for all of that. And it just, there's this really nice, neat linkage and it's just such an important thing that, for executives to see and to realize.

So it'll be interesting to see how that, ultimately turns out, but it's an important thing that executives need to understand.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely.

So in your new book you lay out the three pillars, culture, insight, and empathy. Can you unpack just one of those pillars for us today, and give us a practical way a leader could bring it to life for their teams?

Annette Franz: Yeah, I'll talk about it because I just talked a lot about culture. That is the first pillar.

In the book, I look at, building out this feedback culture and not only a feedback culture, but a listening culture. And again, like I said, listening anywhere. I advocate for, when I'm working with my clients to do employee round tables or executive tours where they go from location to location, and they swap. Going out and listening to employees and taking the time share information, but also making sure that probably about 80% of the time is you sit there and listen. You listen to what employees are saying and it's not just about you giving them information that they can get off of the internet or, next week's email kind of thing.

The other side of it is to develop personas. And there's both employee personas and internal customer personas. So employee personas is, who are the people that work for this company and their experience versus the internal customer personas where it's who are the different types of internal customers that different employees deal with, and how do we design the experience internally so that if I'm a marketing person or whoever I am, and I need to reach out to the help desk, what are my needs? How should that experience be designed for me versus somebody who's in engineering. There's a whole section or several chapters on the importance of personas as well and how it's really important to talk to employees.

Jason S. Bradshaw: I wasn't going to go down this path, but I've been in organizations or worked with organizations as I'm sure you have, where leaders openly say to their teams, this is the score we have to achieve in our employee survey, because if we don't, our bonuses are on the line, or this is gonna happen. It's not gonna be good for me, it's not gonna be good for you. So just put what they want to hear.

Start with, I think that says a lot about the culture, but how do we break that cycle?

Annette Franz: Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I, it happens both with customers and with employees. We chase the score and we need to have the conversation. There's gotta be this mindset shift, and to your point, it is the culture. And that's where we need to shift the culture to be one of listening, to be one of feedback, to be one of action. And to be one of, we're not chasing the score.

On the customer experience side. We've had it here where in the US, my very first experience with it was when I worked at J.D. Power, I bought a car and it was like, Hey, you're gonna get a survey, right? And here's a free oil change. Here's a candy bar, here's my firstborn, you know, it's crazy like that, right? Or we'll walk into a drugstore and they'll hand us the receipt with the QR code or the URL on the end of the receipt and slide a candy bar underneath the receipt and say, Hey, you gotta give me all tens. [00:18:00] And that's when you know that the business is not focused on the people. The business is not focused on employees or customer experience. They're focused on metrics, and they're just focused on the numbers and they don't care what it takes. We just want the number to move. Like you said, very different behavior when you're doing that versus when you're really taking the time to listen and improve based on what you hear. And it really does have to tie back to your core values, your behaviors, the culture that you've designed.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, we could probably both could tell a few stories about how people have tried to gain the system. I'm really resisting, but we'll keep that for another.

Annette Franz: Let's do a separate episode.

Annette Franz: Yeah. There's two things that you have to do. First of all, i'll just say this. Anytime that I have gotten executives in a journey mapping workshop where we've got customers or a mapping workshop where we've got employees and we're doing their journeys, and we bring executives in, for them to hear the customers talk, or for them to hear the employees talk and go, oh my gosh, I never realized we, we made them do that. Or we put them through that process, or we put them through that pain or that many steps or whatever. Anytime I've done that, it's been just such an eye-opener that I've gotten executive commitment for CMOs and CCOs to move forward on whatever they need to. That's what it is. And it's, usually what we say is we need to appeal to the left and the right side of the brain. We got that number side. We gotta make sure they have that connection to business outcomes and everything. And they understand that we're doing this, and the work that we're hearing from our customers today, this is the [00:20:00] outcome. And it's bad for this particular customer, it's bad for all our customers.

Then there's a storytelling side and the creative side where we need to let them hear the customer, and hear the voice. And hear the pain, and hear the frustration. And that's when I've always seen the executive jump in and say, let's do this. I can't bear that. I can't believe that's the legacy I'm gonna leave is that I made so much pain for our customers or for our employees, we need to fix this. And that's to me, has been what's taken us from mapping to action is really letting the executives see what's what.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, it makes so much sense. I was just thinking about making the executives do their own expense claims versus having their assistants do it.

Annette Franz: Exactly. There is that too.

Jason S. Bradshaw: And as soon as I started to think it, I was like, my former executive assistants would be throwing daggers at me now going you hated it... that's why we did it.

Annette Franz: Okay. Can it be anything in the lunchbox?

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I didn't say what's in the lunchbox.

Annette Franz: All right. So here's how I explain it. Okay. You see the things in the lunchbox, you're the employee. You made those things. Did you have everything you needed? Did your mom buy all the things that you needed to make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or did you end up just with a peanut butter sandwich today because she didn't have the jelly? And the dishes weren't clean, so you didn't have a good knife to really butter it up and so it's got jagged edges and yeah, it wasn't the greatest. That's the employee experience, right? You have to have all the tools, everything you need to do your job well and your job was to make that sandwich.

Jason S. Bradshaw: I love though how you're tied in that employees need to be given the right tools to do their job. And how often is it that we expect our employees to deliver an amazing experience, not once, not twice, but consistently, but yet, when they say to us... my computer reboots five times a day, or, there's 35 steps that just take too long to get the outcome that we fail to listen.

Annette Franz: Yeah, that's a great question. Everybody needs to advocate up, right?

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, I love that advocacy space, as leaders. There is no excuse for not advocating for what is right. You don't need another tool. You don't need anything other than your voice. And we as leaders should absolutely have that.

One of the other things you've written about that I really love is this notion of designing experiences for memory, not just moments.

Why are memories more powerful than moments, and how can leaders intentionally create them?

I guess that's in a very simplistic way of saying it. Experiences are emotion. That's at the heart of what a customer experience is. And when we talk about employee experience and customer experience, a lot of times what we're talking about is the designing of those interactions. We're not talking about the emotions and the feelings that customers are having about those interactions, right? So you really have to look at both sides of that.

Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely agree.

Annette, as we come to wrap up the show today, if you could stand in front of every CEO and deliver one sentence on why culture and employee experience matter, what would that sentence be?

Jason S. Bradshaw: I love that culture is not fluff. It's your operating system.

Annette, thank you so much for joining us today.

Annette Franz: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Great conversation.

Jason S. Bradshaw: You've reminded us that culture isn't just a backdrop, it's the stage, the script, and the cast that make everything else possible. When we understand our employees, when we design our experiences with culture inside and empathy, we're not just creating happier teams, we're unlocking the key to lasting customer loyalty and business success.

And to everyone listening today, take this as your call to action. Look in the mirror of your culture because when you transform the experience, you transform your business. Thanks for listening to Chats With Jason.