Vivowire: The IT Crowd, FOBO & Traumatizing Birthdays
Welcome to edition #87 of Vivowire, the Workvivo newsletter!
This week, we're talking about the link between employee experience and customer satisfaction, the fear of being offline while WFH, and how to traumatize an introverted 13 year old on their birthday.
Let’s go! 🥳
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This Week’s Top 3 Thumbstoppers
1. IC + EE = ✅ – easy!
TL;DR: Even for me, someone whose brain becomes a toy monkey clapping miniature cymbals as soon as it comes across a number (seriously, ask Bryan), the maths is simple: informed and happy employees = informed and happy customers.
You know how internal communication and employee experience are important – like, really important – for your company culture, staff retention, and overall brand?
They also play a key role in how happy your customers are.
To sum it up, if you treat your people better than how Reynholm Industries treats Roy and Moss, you can almost definitely look forward to better customer service than that given by Roy and Moss.
In his most recent blog post for Workvivo, Simon Rutter says it much better – “Internal comms and EX are critical drivers of better customer service. The more your people understand their role in your business, are engaged in their work, and feel empowered to make decisions, the better your customer service, and therefore financial performance, will be.”
Don’t:
Do:
My favorite part of Simon’s advice is to make your customers part of the solution. “Much of the work in EX is about co-creation. This means collaborating with the people you’re trying to help to develop a better overall solution.
“You can invite groups of customers to round tables, workshops, whatever format it may be, and, if they are clear on why they are there and what is in it for them (better service), then in my experience they are usually more than happy to participate.
“One of the reasons EX can be so powerful when it comes to improving customer service is that it involves persona work. By building a customer persona based on in-depth online and in-person research, you have a much clearer picture of the problem you’re facing and the human impacts of that. As such, you can design more relevant, tailored, and successful interventions that reflect the real-life concerns of your customers and employees.”
Read Simon’s article here! Follow his recommendations and there'll hardly be a 'did you turn it off and on again' in sight. 🧑💻
2. FOMO? FOBO? WHO-BO?!
TL;DR: Does anyone like acronyms? No. Is there another new acronym to add to the ever-expanding lexicon? Yep!
You’ve heard of FOMO – fear of missing out. (Though if that one slipped you by, don’t worry – I’m sure you’ll feel super included in the next round of colloquialisms.)
What you might not have come across yet is FOBO – fear of being offline. According to a recent issue of LinkedIn Insider, employees are experiencing FOBO due to the perceived pressure of being productive while working from home. What they do in response, it says, is “continuously update their Slack status to let colleagues know what they're working on or if they're away from their keyboard.”
If the technology had been there at the time, I can’t help feeling that alternate-reality Phoebe Buffay would have been doing just that.
Remember in season six of Friends, when Phoebe was briefly reimagined as a Wall Street executive who ended up in hospital because of work-related stress?
Weird, I know. But a useful(?) cautionary tale all the same.
LinkedIn users weighed in on the topic of FOBO, sharing their tips for working through it. Here’s a summary.
Don’t be afraid to set your status as Do Not Disturb – I also use productivity methods such as prioritizing. For the tasks that don't require immediate attention, I may also manage expectations on when I can respond and action.
Take your planning offline – What should really matter is the results and what you deliver – not how many hours your status is green or how many calls you spend time on (especially passively). I like personally to disconnect and plan my day, project, presentation, etc. in a journal without any messages popping up and distracting me. Then I connect and take action/create slides/join the call with a clear agenda and questions.
Disconnect on purpose – I disconnect for focus and have tried hard since lockdown to claw back spaces and times when I am purposely uncontactable. We shouldn't feel like we have access to each other whenever we need it (during work times or not). Just because you can't immediately pick up a teams call or respond to a chat-message doens't mean you aren't working. And working doesn't always mean being plugged in to the laptop.
The moral of the story is that you should channel more ‘Phoebe singing Smelly Cat’ than ‘Phoebe having a work-related heart attack’.
Recommended by LinkedIn
And that you should probably start an acronym glossary.
3. Under the Lens… Verizon, Retention & Being 13
TL;DR: Here's why Verizon employees stick around. And an insight into my preteen life that nobody asked for.
A Fortune headline about Verizon’s CHRO caught my eye recently. The article is her advice on employee strategies for achieving high retention rates – at Verizon, the average employee tenure is 13 years, she says. That’s more than three times the US average.
That’s a pretty long time. When I think about the many things I had already done in the first 13 years of my life – being a devoted Tamagotchi parent, watching approximately 28,376 episodes of The Simpsons, being serenaded ‘Happy Birthday, Lisa’ far too many times – it really puts it into perspective.
What are Verizon’s employee strategies? Sam says there are three critical angles: culture, professional growth opportunities, and benefits.
“Culture is a verb, it can't just be something that HR or the CEO puts on paper. It's what people really feel and experience,” she tells Fortune. Key focal points at the company include employee wellbeing and holistic support, ‘stay interviews’ for people after their first year with Verizon, and the Raise the Bar annual leadership program.
But how do its people feel about those areas?
Verizon is rated 3.8 out of 5 stars on both Glassdoor and Comparably. Its highest-rated areas include diversity, happiness, perks and benefits, compensation, and manager score, and reviews specifically mention Verizon’s transparency, supportive leadership, flexibility, training and resources, competitive compensation and benefits, and great people.
Its Comparably retention score is 69%, landing it in first place against four competitors – Sprint, Level 3 Communications, Lumen, and CableLabs. It also sits in first place for its overall culture, eNPS, and gender equality.
The bottom line? Your people are likely to stay longer if you treat them right. Who knew?!
Invest in their work environment, give them opportunities to upskill and progress, and pay them fairly.
Simple as.
In return, your average employee tenure might just match the age of a preteen standing on a chair in TGI Friday’s trying to blow out the candles on the birthday cake she has to hold while everyone in the restaurant looks at her, but she can’t because her dad accidentally bought trick candles that don’t go out, and the cake is really heavy and this will become a core memory whether she likes it or not, and, once again, they won’t stop singing ‘Happy birthday, Lisa’.
Okay, that’s enough oversharing for one week.
Quote of the Week
“I wish I could, but I don’t want to” – Phoebe Buffay, demonstrating how not to approach EX as an employer
What’s up at Workvivo?
Top 10 Company Values in 2024 (& Beyond): It would be great if we could survey the workers of the world and come up with a universal list of the most sought-after company values. Lacking that, we can look to some of the existing research on job-search priorities and employee attitudes for clues on the most popular company values. Read it here!
How to Create a Meaningful Internal International Women’s Day Campaign: Fast approaching on March 8, International Women's Day (IWD) is seen as one of the biggest employee engagement days of the year. So what can employers do to ensure their internal IWD communications are truly meaningful and not just lip service? Learn more!
5 ways AI writing tools can help you improve productivity at work: Learn the benefits of using AI writing tools to help save time, improve productivity, and improve your business communications. Continue reading on Zoom's blog!
Final Thought
Don’t underestimate the power of internal comms and EX to shape your customer satisfaction.
Don’t give in to the FOBO.
And always interrogate your dad on where he bought your birthday candles before he lights them.
Until next time, Vivowire out! 🕯️
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