Employee understanding and cracking the code of a better employee experience - Interview with Annette Franz

0:01Welcome. This is the Punk CX podcast. My name is Adrian Swinscoe, and I'm an advisor, bestselling author, Forbes contributor, and general explorer of the service and experience space. The thing I'm really interested in is how do we create organizations that produce better outcomes for both their customers and their people. This podcast has been running since January 2011, and so we have a big archive to explore. Check out the archive at adrienswinscoe.com. That's enough from me. Let's get into the interview.

0:36So welcome to the next edition of the Punk CX podcast. With me today, I have Annette Franz, an old friend, Annette Franz, who is founder and chief experience officer of CX Journey Incorporated, no less, and an author of now three books. Hi, Annette. How are you doing? Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me again, I should say. Well, exactly. I know I did look it up and you were last year back on the podcast back in 2019. Nice. It was like blimey. And so that was for, I guess at the time, probably your first book. That one. That one above your shoulder, Customer Understanding. But I mean, I'd like to hope that I've had people that listen regularly to the podcast since kind of like 2019, but I'm never going to make that sort of assumption.

1:25so but it's awesome that you're still going i mean this is six years later i mean this is pretty this is pretty impressive well thank you podcast too so podcast started in january 2011 oh my goodness that long already yeah well i mean it was under a different name but it was still a podcast and still doing the same sort of thing and trying to do the same sort of space and using all sorts of technology i remember i started started recording some of them were face-to-face but if we did them virtually, we're using Skype with a plug-in called Ecamm Recorder. And it was... That technology has gone to the graveyard of software, so...

2:02Oh, crumbs. And I listened to the audio quality of all that sort of stuff and how I was doing back then, and it was a bit like, yeah, that's a bit rubbish. But, you know, learn as you go. It was all very DIY, and it still is a bit DIY, and I like it that way. Nothing wrong with that. Absolutely. Now, I do have to ask, though, what was the title of that podcast? oh um now you just caught me i don't know i can't recall the title of the podcast but i remember who the guest was the guest was a gentleman by the name of grant laboff ah okay and it was he's a sales and marketing kind of guy and we were talking about sort of customers some of the customer related sort of stuff or something's right he was doing and so that's that's what that was my first foray into the podcasting kind of world i love it i love it um it's a good memories there i'm sure well absolutely absolutely and more than 500 later um amazing we're sort of like still plowing the furrow kind of learning as we go trying to shine shine a spotlight on people doing some cool stuff and you are one of them because we want i want to talk to you about this new book we've got out but before we do that can you tell me give me a thumbnail sketch on the net just for the people that don't know you well how do you how do you wrap up 30 how many is it 33 years into a thumbnail.

3:22Let's say. Very quickly. Yes, very quickly. Yes. So I started when I was, yeah. No, I, you know, I started my career 33 years ago at J.D. Power & Associates and have spent all my time focusing on, you know, employee experience, customer experience, corporate culture. It's kind of all come full circle, you know, over the years and all tied together very nicely. Back in early 2017, I jumped out of the corporate world. I'd been both on the vendor slash consulting side and on the client side and started CX Journey Inc. And my focus is still employee experience, customer experience, and culture. And it's speaking, it's writing, it's content, and most of all, it's consulting.

4:07I love working with my clients and helping them through their transformations. And, you know, that's what I love to do. And that's why I jumped out and started my own business. Perfect. Now, let's get back to the matter at hand. The matter at hand is this new book, the third book, called Employee Understanding, a three pillar framework for designing a great experience and driving business success. Now, so first of all, you know, I've written a book in a couple of years now, if not more, a couple of years, three years, maybe. and so I know how much work it takes so first of all congratulations on that and so but can you tell me um tell me a little bit about the book and how it came about and you know its main thesis and what is it for yeah now I'll start with how it came about because I think this is I think this is really important right I think you know like I said I started my career 33 years ago I started it with J.D.

5:03Power and Associates and if folks know who J.D. Power and Associates is we focus very heavily on customer satisfaction and loyalty. But I was working, and those were a lot of, at the time, syndicated research, but I was working on the customer research side. And I would go out and talk to clients and I'd say, well, you can't just listen to customers, you've got to listen to employees too. And they would say, we'll listen to employees later. Let's just do some voice of the customer work now or customer satisfaction work now. It wasn't even voice of the customer at that time yet. So, you know, I've been talking about this focus on employees for a really long time and understood early on that connection between, you know, employees back then, again, employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

5:51It wasn't, you know, EX and CX until, you know, probably almost a decade later. But so that was a really important connection. And I still think employee experience is a mess. So I think that is a big part of why this book came about. Because I wrote, as we talked about earlier, customer understanding. But everything that I wrote about in there, as I'm writing that book, I'm going, I got to do an employee understanding at some point too, because we've got to do this same work to design the employee experience or design an experience for employees too. So I think that's probably a good transition to the main thesis behind the book.

6:32And what the book does is it provides, as you said in the title, the three pillar framework for really understanding employees and designing an experience that is a great experience for them. And then ultimately, when we focus on employees, we get a great customer experience. And then we've got business success as well. So I think the really important thing there is that, you know, if we think about employee understanding and how that's all about listening to employees and learning everything about them, same as with customer understanding, so that we can ultimately design a better experience for them.

7:07I think that's really the main thesis behind the book, but there's so much more to it than that. And so because of that, because of that, there's so much more to it than that. The book is really for any business leader or any people manager who wants to really build that, you know, engaged and high performing workforce, right? And it's also not just for, you know, general business leaders, but really for the EX and the CX leaders who really need to work hand in hand to ensure that, you know, as I said, a great employee experience leads to a great customer experience. And I think the problem is, is that a lot of organizations, A, don't think about it in that regard, and B, don't have an employee experience leader or lump that employee experience work on HR when it's a completely separate thing.

7:58Sorry, that was very long-winded. I think that was actually spot on. It makes me think about a present day analogy. All the talk right now is about artificial intelligence and the latest flavor of. and but if you dig into that you realize that there's um the old acronym which is gigo g-i-g-o kind of like applies to artificial intelligence i garbage in garbage out so if you've got crappy data yeah and to build on this you're you're going to get crappy outcomes right and i think sort of the same thinking the same sort of analogy sort of applies to employees right how can you expect to deliver like a standout experience if you've got if you haven't got standout people or an environment where the people can stand out exactly exactly and so there is that garbage in garbage out sort of type of um kind of like a way of thinking about things and and so I completely get that.

9:08I've always kind of believed that great customer experience is a function of employee experience and then the broader sense, your contractor experience, your supplier experience, all of those different things because they're all part of a bigger ecosystem. Exactly. And I think a lot of leaders don't understand that. I don't know how many meetings I've been in with leaders where somebody will lean over to me and say, oh, thank you, talking about the employee experience and the connection there. Oh, thank you for saying that. I didn't even realize that or didn't even think about that or don't look at it in that way.

9:41And it's crazy because, you know, employees are the ones who design, build, sell, service, deliver, all of these things. They're the ones who are, yeah, they're fundamental to delivering a great experience. So what I wanted to do, rather than actually talk about the whole book, because you obviously you want people to buy the book. Right? Absolutely. I wanted to just dig into a few things. Okay, sure. it out just because it'll give people a flavor and also kind of like it'll sort of parse out some of the different things that you're talking about um within that and so the first thing i wanted to do because you know i think there's a common mistake is that people will talk about you know before problem if you've been around long enough you'll realize that before people were really talking about employee experience people were talking about employee engagement and you're like, hang on, these things are different, right?

10:47And so I wanted to kind of hear from you, like what's the difference between an employee engagement and employee experience? And that's a great place to start and is a great question. In its simplest terms or simplest distinction or form of differentiating the two, employee engagement really is an outcome of a great employee experience, right? So employee experience is the sum of all the interactions that an employee has over the, you know, duration of employment. And especially, you know, the feelings, emotions and perceptions about those interactions and something that I call the capabilities.

11:28And those are the, again, part of that is, you know, what leadership does and to create that environment so that they can have a great experience and do what they've come to set out to do. So that's the employee experience. That's a definition of employee experience, whereas employee engagement really, I tend to define it as this confluence of events, right? There's a part that happens on the employee side and there's a part that happens on the employer side. So it's that confluence of emotions, commitment, passion, the sense of ownership that employees have as they're working for the brand, right?

12:07And then what the organization does to really facilitate and to enhance those emotions and that commitment, right? And to me, that's where engagement happens, right? And employees have this sense of they want to give more because they've been given more. right? So, so, and they've been given more is that great experience that leads to the outcome of, of employee engagement. There you go. So sayeth Annette France. There you go. And so, but then, then you go on to the book and, and, and we mentioned before, because it's in the subtitle about these three pillars and stuff. And I thought, well, actually it might be useful to for you to, or for me to ask you to sort of outline the three pillars and to explain, I mean, here's a three-legged stool, right?

12:56And this is kind of why they're all important. Because then it gives people kind of an idea of the broader framework that you're talking about. Exactly. Yeah, thank you for that. And it's funny because, you know, as I said, as I was writing customer understanding, I thought, oh, gosh, you know, I can just talk about the three ways to achieve customer understanding and do the same thing for employee understanding. And as I got to thinking about it, and especially after having written Built to Win and thinking about some of the work that I've done, the pillars evolved in a little bit of a different way than the three ways that you read about in customer understanding.

13:29So the first pillar is culture. And culture really is the precursor for a great employee experience. It's a precursor for then obviously a great customer experience and then ultimately for great business outcomes. That's why I always say fix the culture, fix the outcome. So it really is, like you said earlier, it's about creating that environment where employees are, you know, they're heard, they're valued, they're empowered, they're put first. And when we do that, and then it just becomes, it becomes a no brainer. It becomes, and it's the first pillar for a reason. It's the first pillar for that very reason, because it is the precursor to everything else.

14:08The second pillar is, I call that one insight. And that one I've wrapped, if you've read Customer Understanding, I've wrapped two of the ways to understand customers into insight. So insight is all about listening and learning, right? Making sure we take the time to listen to our employees. But not only listen, but first and foremost, create the right environment. And this is what I say, why I say too, and why I said earlier that this book is for business leaders. because they're the ones that have to create that environment where we listen and we learn and we act on what we hear, right? So this one is all about getting feedback from employees.

14:46And it's not just surveys. It's however, you know, there are many other ways to get feedback from employees. The data, data out of our people analytics or HR systems. And then also about developing employee personas and internal customer personas. So that's a second pillar, insight. And then the third pillar is empathy. And I know that a lot of people think that, you know, empathy is really an overused word in our profession, but it really is an important part of how we, again, we create this environment where we understand and we listen and we learn and we lead through, you know, what we've learned.

15:23So this one is, as you might expect if you read Customer Standing, is this one is about journey mapping, but I also, you know, so we can walk in our employees' shoes. But this one is also about, it is about empathy too. And I talk a bit about how we build that empathy muscle for our leaders. So there's a little bit more, it goes a little bit deeper into that pillar in this book. So I'm excited about these three because they're different from, you know, that first book, but they're also, you know, they stand on their own and really support what I'm trying to, you know, the message I'm trying to get out here.

16:00Perfect. And I think, I mean, I think I really like the idea about the empathy sort of thing and how, and because I think, you know, I think there was, yeah, it's probably back in late 2020, early 2021, there was a big wave of, oh, we need more empathy in our service and experience interactions. And I was thinking about this, and I said, well, the problem is that people react to stuff, right? And they go, oh, we'll do a training course, and that'll tick. That'll solve that. And I said, well, no, actually, I think that the analogy I used was it's a bit like you don't wake up one day and just run a marathon.

16:49right you wake up and you decide that you want to you want to run a marathon and then you've got to set plans in place to be able to prepare to train to have we eat the right sort of things have the right equipment pick the right race all those different things and you plan for that and then you become kind of like this marathon runner and i think empathy and being empathetic is is diff is it's almost the same it's a bit like you have to build this musculature in many ways and I use that kind of word intentionally because it's like you know if you don't exercise the muscles they atrophy yep absolutely and so you've got to take you've got to look at that and I think it's and and when I think about that and apply that to leaders many leaders will go oh we need a framework well we need a framework to do that yeah but it starts with you you and exactly and I love hearing stories about how you get stories about different leaders where they um they would like walk the floor or they split their time so they're kind of they're in amongst the people they're not getting sucked into all these meetings because they're prioritizing kind of this is important and therefore i need to dedicate time to do that because it keeps them connected um and that's the sort of thing that i think is that sort of really matters is that if you think about changing something sometimes you have to think about well what is what is the thing i need to change in myself first exactly exactly in order to do that um and so i think that's you know that's kind of really important but rather than going down another that rabbit hole um let's let's pick another one because when i was looking through the book you know you mentioned it earlier about this your time at jd power and associates yeah and then you said W.

18:38Earl Sussex Jr. and Leonard Schlesinger, I think hopefully I've pronounced that right, came to your office. Now, if people who don't know who W. Earl Sussex Jr. and Leonard Schlesinger, they are both from Harvard and two of the authors of putting the service profit chain to work. Now, if you don't know anything about the service profit chain, look it up. Look up, put in service profit chain and hbr and you'll find the article and it'll blow your mind because it was written originally in 1996 or something i think that's about right somewhere around there yes yeah and it it's i mean i'm not gonna tell you what about it but it's like it's like this stuff's been around for a long time yeah right and so i wanted to say that was just this is me i'm being a bit of a fanboy and i've been a bit nerdy and i wanted you to tell me a bit like when when Mrs.

19:34Sasser and Mrs. Leshender came to your work, what happened? I mean, even back then, I think I was already a fangirl back then. And I, you know, just knowing that they were coming from Harvard and wanting to see the data that we had and what we were working on and work together with J.D. Power & Associates to put together the research and ultimately the output of all of that, you know. And it is interesting. I'll come back to them showing up there. But it really is interesting that this has been around for 30 years. And we're still trying to push that noodle up the hill and make that connection, right?

20:14Because they did it 30 years ago. And it's not fluff. It's not based on a thought in somebody's head. It's based on data and research and everything that they did. So yeah, very, very interesting. um we obviously we had tons of data about customers limited employee data but we had um obviously a ton of data on customers and this was the time when they were really compiling their data and research for their work on the connection between satisfaction and loyalty and why satisfied customers defect and you know as you mentioned the service profit chain and so they were reviewing some of the work that we had done or were at the time we're doing for Xerox.

20:58And that's the work that's documented in the in that article, Why Satisfied Customers Defect. And so it was it was it was an interesting week or so that they spent with us. And as you can imagine, like I said, I was already a fangirl. They were already iconic at that point. But having them come to visit the office and use the data that we were gathering was really a memorable time in my career. And I've got the Service Profit Chain book and the follow-up to that book. And I've used that Service Profit Chain in presentations and in all of my books and written about it a lot because it is, like you said, it's not fluff.

21:39It's a real connection there. And it starts with culture. They started with culture. And I don't know that they called it culture at the time, but workplace design, right? Which is critical. So like you said, grading the environment to set you up for building a great experience for your employees. And so with all this, you know, the three pillars and the thing about employee experience and of all the work you were doing around this kind of framework. I mean, as you said before, it's like some people are like, I never thought about it that way. Or I approached it the wrong way. We don't do it like that.

22:21But if people want to know where they should start, where they should do first, what they should do first, I mean, what would you tell them? I would tell them without a doubt it has to be the culture, right? If you don't have that foundation in place to support putting people first to, as I said earlier, to this culture where we're all about listening and learning and using what we hear to deliver a better experience to care for our employees. If we don't have that foundation in place, it's going to fall apart. And I've seen it happen. the pillar number one is called is culture for a reason and that and that culture has to be driven from the top right so i i also talk about it as as the foundation but i also talk about it as the as the soil right because it has this supporting role as you know it's the soil it's the it's the ground that all of that grows from but it's the the foundation and it's a pillar because it's holding up employee understanding, really making it a strategic priority.

23:32I back in, and as I was thinking about what we would talk about today, I remembered a conversation that I had with Peter Aceto, who's the CEO of Tangerine Bank. He and I talked back in 2016, and this sort of solidifies this whole notion around why culture is really the first thing you've got to focus on, right? He said that one of the most important lessons that he learned was from Tony Hsieh, God Raps His Soul. He said that Tony never underestimated the importance of having the right culture after his first mistake, not having the right culture in place. After that, where he had started businesses where they had failed because he wasn't focused on culture.

24:20That's why Zappos is the great place that it is today, because he had learned his lesson and made sure that culture was the first thing that he focused on. So he certainly aborted mission a few times before he got it right. And he certainly got it right, you know, building Zappos the way that he did. And how would you go about, I mean, because a lot of people say, we've got our culture nailed, but how would you go about helping people understand whether they have or not i mean because there's a difference between you know what is plastered on walls of enterprises or corporate offices and stuff and then what actually happens in reality yeah yeah you're absolutely right you know what would you do to give people a bit of a reality check on that because yeah so so when i first go in and and i would i would do a culture audit so um and when i first start working with clients i will interview the leadership team i will interview sampling of employees and a sampling of customers and do, in a sense, a culture audit.

25:23I ask a lot of questions about the culture itself, about the leadership, about the employee experience and the customer experience. And it's an eye-opener what you hear from folks. And then I take a look at that and I set it next to their core values. And to your point, the core values often end up just as posters on a wall. And you can very closely see that what people are telling me does not align with what the culture was at some point thought to be. So culture is core values plus behavior. So it's really important that you do that work to A, define the core values and B, define the associated behaviors so that they do become just how we do things around here.

26:04But start with a culture auditor. A culture assessment is absolutely the way to go. So you can really, trust me, it's very eye-opening at times what uh what the the ceo will tell me that the culture is or was supposed to be and what it actually is today i mean i must admit i asked that kind of question slightly selfishly because i've got the i'll do this little project right now with a um it's a volunteer-based thing for a local uh not-for-profit okay and they want they wanted to do something and i said well i need to do something which is kind of like pretty easy to do and so what we ended up doing is we ended up setting up a bit of a like a form thing that they could fill in and asked their staff, their volunteers, their service recipients and their wider community to describe like in three words describe what we do or what it means to you sort of thing and you get this kind of like all this input and then say give us another three words around what you like about what we do.

27:13And then another three words about what you think we should do more of or do better and something. And you get all this input. And it's a really simple sort of thing. But what you do is you get all this kind of like multidimensional raw data from all these different stakeholder groups, which you can then hold up to, what is it we say about ourselves? You can go, you either go, ah, that's not too bad, different language, but it's sort of the same or yikes. Yes. Yes. And that's a great series of questions. I mean, you can just ask three questions. Do I do that with employees? Same thing. I say, give me just keywords, phrases, don't need to be big, long paragraphs.

27:53How would you describe the culture? And then I'll ask, what's the glue that holds the company together? What's the unglue? What breaks it apart? And same thing, right? I mean, it's very eye-opening at times what's being said. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think you're absolutely right. You have to kind of like, you got to start with where you're at, not where you think you're at, but where you're at. Yeah, absolutely. Which is really important. But it would be remiss of us if, you know, we think about all of this sort of stuff, if we didn't ask, well, how does the emergence of, you know, generative AI and now kind of genetic AI kind of help or hinder all of this?

28:30Yeah. Well, I think, you know, first of all, people have to get over the fact that AI is going to take my job away because I think that I think we're a long ways away from that. And I think for the benefit of both employees and especially for customers that human in the loop is going to be a very big part of AI and employees and the employee experience going forward to deliver a great experience for a customer. But I think with AI, it's helpful. I think the automation piece of it takes out some of that burnout and some of the menial, repetitive tasks that really drive employees crazy and frustrate them.

29:11How many times do I have to help people reset their password or do just the little things or run this report every day that I run 300 days out of here? Just setting up those kinds of things that can be very easily handed off to some type of automation, AI agent, whatever you want to use to automate those kinds of things. I think that burnout is a big part of what drives employees away because they want to do meaningful work. And meaningful work that adds value, right? And so if we get rid of some of those menial tasks, some of those repetitive tasks, and we allow them to free up some of their time so they can do those more value-added things, building stronger relationships with customers, et cetera, et cetera, I think that in the end leads to a better employee experience as well.

30:09So I think we really need to spend more time making sure that when we do use AI, that we use it in a good way. And we start to really think about what's ultimately what's the outcome here and how does it impact our employees and how can we work together with our employees to make sure that it's helpful and not harmful. Awesome. so and i hopefully that gives people a bit of a flavor of some of the things that are in the book what you're talking about obviously there's so much more in the actual kind of thing um but before we can move on to some quick fire kind of questions that's a wrap i mean it is there anything else you'd like to highlight from the from the book that we've that we've missed out i think probably one of the biggest things that i want to get out there is nothing changes if nothing changes.

30:57I have said that so many times to my wife. And I've said it in my personal life too, right? Nothing changes, nothing changes. It's so important. You have to do the work. You can't just sit here and go, oh, well, I know we got to do that. Or we've gathered the data, or we've listened, or we've done the work, but we haven't done anything with it. I think that's just so important to remember. And it seems so cliche or so throwaway kind of stuff, but it is so true that nothing changes and nothing changes. So I think that's a big, you know, if we could put a big poster out there, maybe that's the next sign on my wall back here is nothing changes and nothing changes.

31:36So we have one of those big pull down things, which goes, nothing changes, nothing changes. Exactly. Maybe that's my, my virtual backdrop is, uh, you know, my, uh, that, that, but, but it's so true because I, I see people do the work, but it's doing the work for, you know ants do work too but you know you got to think about ultimately what your what your goal is in your end game and work toward those outcomes and and if you don't then you know it's all for not yeah no absolutely i would probably go further and go um don't start something if you're not willing to finish it yes agreed because like what's the point yeah and if actually if anything then it's probably going to be more demotivating.