This blog continues from my earlier posts where I offered Step One and Step Two to engage Ambassadors and Supporters in your service culture change initiatives.

Step Three: Grow your people to grow your culture

To achieve long-term culture change and service improvement goals, you must build a solid foundation of continuous service improvement. You can do this by growing your people through Service Education and creating a strong Service Improvement Process.

Focus on Service Education

Many people are uncomfortable with change or resist change. Their negative behaviors and mind-set can slow your change campaign. In the white paper, Engineering a Service Culture Transformation that was recently cited in Harvard Business Review, we outline Four Rules, including a rapid and comprehensive plan to educate and motivate employees at all levels, leaving little room for negative influence to grow or fester.

Start engaging your Supporters, fast. Make sure they understand what service excellence really means, and how it applies to their jobs. (We define Service Excellence as taking the next step UP to create more value for someone else.)

Do your Supporters appreciate the role they play in building momentum for the new culture? Help your Supporters to recognize how they are capable of creating and delivering greater value to their internal colleagues and their external customers.

When you invest time and attention to build up your people’s confidence, competence, and creativity, they will generate new ideas, take new actions, and create new value to help you build your business.

Focus on Continuous Improvement

In Engineering a Service Revolution, Rule #4 states that an organization should not just focus on traditional KPIs, such as customer satisfaction, loyalty scores, operational measures, and sales. Instead, organizations seeking a rapid improvement of service must focus strongly on leading indicators of better service, such as the number of value-adding ideas generated, the number of new service actions implemented, and the responses received from both customers and colleagues.

Uplifting Service workshops encourage practical analysis and creative thinking that lead to new ideas and actions. It is important to organize service improvement campaigns to continuously encourage these ideas and leverage the positive impact of these actions. This can include contests, communications, and recognition across the organization. Following this approach:

Education > Problems > Ideas > Actions > Results

validates employees as being capable of acquiring new habits, developing new ways of thinking, and implementing new ways of doing and being. This personal perspective in every member of your team is the fuel for your sustainable cultural change.

Start getting people to make small changes early in the change process. Help your Supporters see that they, and not just the Ambassadors, are capable of making change happen. As soon as you win over your Supporters as loyal advocates for change, they will go out of their way to achieve your long-term service improvement goals.

Are you planning ahead for wide-spread service improvement workshops?

Are you promoting early wins and success stories throughout the organization?

Are you developing your people for continuous service improvement?

Let us know your ideas and share your service culture success stories!