Remember the vision of the ‘paperless office’ that took the corporate world by storm in the Nineties? Or the work-life balance conversation that led to the idea of a four-day work week in the early 2000s? Neither of these visions materialised. Nor was technology able to achieve the vision of eliminating corporate silos.
Today, only 24% of employees in Europe, and 19% in the US, agree that they are “satisfied with co-operation between their department and other departments”, according to Gallup. This is a growing trend — but why?
We’ve increasingly become a world of hyper-specialised individuals. This, in addition to the fact that an employee spends an average of just four years in the same job, prevents workers from gaining a well-rounded perspective of what’s going on in their organisation. Ask most people in their sixties and seventies and you’ll discover that they, while working at the same company for a decade or more, often had dozens of different job duties in that same organisation during that time.
For nearly two years I studied empathy — generally defined as seeing the world through the eyes and perspective of another person. In my research, I discovered an unusual correlation between empathy and common sense. Common sense, as I define it, is seeing things as they are and doing things as they ought to be done. Or, to place it in the context of this article: treating consumers and employees as they themselves would expect to be treated.
The question is: how can you possibly adopt such a perspective if you’ve never sat in the many seats of your co-workers? Or, perhaps worse: if you’ve never felt your customers’ unique pains?
What has become increasingly clear is that we desperately need to change our perspective. When did job rotation fall out of fashion? When the former CEO of McDonald’s, the late Charlie Bell, joined the company in his native Australia at the age of 15, he did so at the bottom of the ladder, flipping burgers at a local franchise. Twenty years later he took the helm. By then he’d held close to 10 different positions.
When Mr Bell passed away, he was widely recognised as one of the organisation’s best culture carriers, because he knew and understood everyone’s point of view.
Mr Bell, along with iconic business founders such as Ikea’s Ingvar Kamprad and Walmart’s Sam Walton, also had another strength in common: they all could empathise with their customers. They were able to keep common sense alive via the customer’s point of view.
Stanley Marcus, chairman emeritus of Neiman Marcus, went so far as to install a direct telephone line to his office in each of his stores.
Mr Kamprad, for instance, often could be found manning the cash register in one of his Ikea stores, with the sole purpose of actually learning about his customers, getting to know them up close and in person. Meanwhile, Stanley Marcus, chairman emeritus of Neiman Marcus, went so far as to install a red telephone in the heart of each of his stores: a direct line to his office.
These leaders did so to stay close to their customers’ point of view, to bypass silos and elevate the truth to the top.
But in today’s world, most leaders, those of banks being no exception, are drowning in bureaucratic work, and outsourcing these duties to customer research departments. These departments often have little or no decision-making power, further disconnecting management from the reality facing their customers.
Mr Kamprad and Mr Marcus didn’t sit behind the cash registers or pick up random customer calls because they needed the data, but rather because it ensured their empathic instinct stayed sharp and relevant. Their customer instinct. The ability to simulate the behaviour of their customers and act on their behalf whenever a decision was made.
That, in truth, is the essence of the problem, but also the solution: the ability to take up and apply another viewpoint. For banks to job-rotate to add a better internal view, to reconnect with the customers, and apply an ‘outside-in’ perspective.
It doesn’t take much. One bank I work with introduced mandatory job rotation for every function once a year for one week. They also welcome five random customers each week to their headquarters. The customers act as sounding boards, with the purpose of ‘asking stupid questions’, which are never actually that stupid.
Another of my banking clients now requires all of their new hires to spend three full days with customers — in their offices or visiting their homes — as part of the onboarding process. They also bring their executives out into the ‘real worlds’ of their customers in a way that allows them to feel a heartbeat and find the pulse. This, in turn, helps reestablish the instinct that is increasingly missing in most decision processes; it helps sharpen and elevate that often diluted purpose, bringing it into the daily lives of all staff members.
When everyone works toward the same goal, energised by the same purpose, organisational silos will disintegrate and become a thing of the past. Or at least they will become less dominant. It’s all about being open to new perspectives — and the creation of customer empathy goes a long way.
Martin Lindstrom is the author of The Ministry of Common Sense and the founder of Lindstrom Company, a business transformation group.
