Tiffani Bova
Employees are burning out faster than ever, and companies still expect similar results using old methods and measurements.
Loving your customers and taking care of their needs and wants is a priority, but remember that to achieve a successful customer experience, you first need to achieve employee success. According to Tiffani Bova, "It's not a new statement; happy employees lead to happy customers, leads to greater growth rates, and happier shareholders."
Bova is known for helping lead the revolution towards a balance of successful customer experience with the employee experience.
"It's the benefit of a compelling and meaningful employee experience, which includes satisfaction, engagement, commitment, and loyalty from your employees," said Bova during our discussion. "Those that speak with customers, deal with customers, those that design products for customers - there is this symbiotic relationship between the two."
As the Chief Growth Evangelist at Salesforce and author of the Wall Street Journal's best-selling book, Growth IQ: Be Smarter About the Choices that will Make or Break your Business, Bova has a long track record of inspiring people to be forward, bold, and to act.
In just the last two years, times have drastically changed, and employees are looking for a meaningful, productive, engaging job where they feel committed to showing up day in and day out. Whether working from the comfort of their homes or in a cozy cubicle, employees need authentic leadership more than ever. Leaders not burnt out can show empathy and loyalty and allow employees to use their voices to help improve things inside the organization.
"Over time, we have improved the experience for our customers by reducing the effort and friction, creating this seamless experience," summarized Bova. "We have not done the same for the employee. As a matter of fact, in both cases, the effort for the employee has gone up, while the experiences they’ve had has gone down. They've been asked to do 'more with less,' to manage and navigate multiple technology solutions to do their job. Most of the time, those solutions are not integrated."
In previous years, what worked for a company may not work now and needs re-evaluation. Technology is constantly advancing. Companies may not need to keep up with all of it. Instead, they do need to be aware of how technological advances can help improve but not take away from the employee or customer experience.
"Allow that employee to add value that the technology can't. That human relationship connection. It's not meant to be handled exclusively by technology," says Bova.
Employees should not be viewed as a replaceable expense. Instead, setting aside funding for quality training, so the performance increases and expectations are aligned is recommended. This investment will allow employees to reduce their effort to fulfill the job required while still meeting or exceeding a customer's expectations.
Tiffany goes on to say, "If the employee is spending all their time navigating bad tech and bad processes, they're never able to show up with the human relationship that we really want to bring forward and let technology take care of those redundant or repetitive tasks from a productivity standpoint."
So, the question leads to this: have we reached that point where we can work towards a company culture that's equally looking at humanity, care, empathy, and the places we need to think about for our society? Plus, genuinely serving the customer, rather than it just being a case of, "whatever we do, we have to do it for the customer!" mentality.
Bova is hopeful and excited to share her upcoming new book in 2023. The book focuses on research from the last three decades where she has discovered that there has been a lack of investment in the employee. The silver lining with the pandemic may have been the catalyst that exposed how badly companies need to focus more on their employees and not solely just the customer.
"While the pandemic was awful, there has been dialogue of paying attention to employee voice, what is important to them, how do we invest in career and development, fair pay for fair work, and how do we allow this dynamic between working in the office and working from home, how do we keep connection in Teams, and collaboration available? It's definitely gotten more complex, but I feel like we're having the right conversations," says Bova.
It boils down to leading with the heart, crafting a people-over-profit strategy while continuing to have these crucial discussions.
Watch the interview with Tiffani Bova and Dan Pontefract in full below or listen to it via the Leadership NOW series podcast.
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Check out my award-winning 4th book, “Lead. Care. Win. How to Become a Leader Who Matters.” Thinkers50 #1 rated thinker, Amy. C. Edmondson of Harvard Business School, calls it “an invaluable roadmap.”Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
