Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Ron: Hi this is Ron Kaufman I’m in Chicago at the service council Smarter Services Symposium with John Barr he’s a head of IT for KONE elevator one of the largest elevator companies in the world we just gave an incredible presentation about the importance of involving and engaging employees from the beginning of a whole service improvement process.

Please, could you give us the essence of what that was all about?

Jon:  Sure Ron yeah the most important aspect was involving employees right from the beginning right when you have the idea so we challenged some common notions you know do you want to get feedback and we said that’s really too late feedback is after you’ve done something to somebody and then you’re asking how did that make you feel you want to ask upfront.

How do you want to feel?

What are you going to design that experience for that employee so that they’re engaged right from the very beginning.

One thing I learned from the meeting and from the Smarter Services Symposium was one of the takeaways for me was that our customer experience can’t be better than our employee experience.

So we have to make sure that our employee experience with the programs and projects we put in place is even better than the customer experience we want to give to our customers ..

Ron: …and that’s the theme that we’ve been hearing over and over and over again now there’s one particular topic I want you to zoom in on for us because in the elevator world physical safety is an enormously important area and I saw your presentation highlighted the critical importance of that and how your safety factors have gone up and gone down appropriately please share with us always the essence of getting employee involved in that.

Jon: Right, so the presentation was actually with our vice president of safety as well, Cory Ward, and one of the things we use is the motions of the employees and many times we don’t really think of our and we think about we’re gonna tell the employees what to do they’re gonna follow our instructions but we really want to engage with them emotionally.

One of the key ways we do that is we have a calendar contest where we have kids usually them kids of our employees or friends who are doing drawings and then we select the most engaging ones and then put those into our safety calendar and that really helps foster a discussion about safety, about what mom or dad does every day when they leave this of safety is yeah we’ll go home safely and why they’re being safe so they can go home to their families.

Ron: So you can have a tech,  and the analytics and the detectors and the sensors but ultimately it’s gonna come down to the people’s emotional drive and desire to make something happen so get them involved from the beginning.

Jon: That’s right you can engage their mind and their but if you engage their heart it’s ten times more powerful.

Ron: Beautiful here in Chicago service counsel John Barr from KONE elevator thanks Jon 

Jon: Thanks Ron!