Fixing the Employee Experience (with Tiffani Bova)

Radical Candor: Communication at Work

Kim Scott interviews Tiffani Bova about her book, 'The Experience Mindset,' focusing on the critical link between employee experience and cu

Key takeaways

• 87% of executives do not know how to act on the employee feedback they collect
• Training is often the first budget item cut during transformations, which undermines long-term ROI

Main topics

• Employee Experience
• Management Training

Notable quotes

What if you don't train them and they stay?

Conclusion

The episode serves as a call to action for leaders to invest in their

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) If you are entering any technology conversation with, I'm going to do more with less, versus saying, how do I use tech to allow me to the art of the possible, to do what I'm doing now differently? either more effectively or give me that scale I need or open up freedom for creativity in my teams. Like it has to be something like that. And I think that's where people are like, sounds great on a bumper sticker, but I need true ROI to get people to invest in this technology. And if I'm going to spend X, I need Y back. And it's like, not everything in the business has that direct line ROI because it's not possible. Speaker 2 (0:45) Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I am Kim Scott, and while the rest of the Radical Candor team is on sabbatical, I am talking to the authors of the books that have meant a lot to me. And I'm thrilled to have with me today Tiffany Bova, author of The Experience Mindset. I love your book, Tiffany, so welcome. Thank Speaker 3 (1:09) you. Speaker 2 (1:10) I feel like if everybody can put the ideas in your book into place, it's not just that their companies will be more successful. You've solved all the world's problems with this book. I don't Speaker 3 (1:21) think Speaker 2 (1:22) so. But it's a big book. I Speaker 3 (1:24) solved some Speaker 2 (1:24) of my Speaker 3 (1:25) own. Speaker 2 (1:25) I solved some Speaker 3 (1:26) of my own. How Speaker 2 (1:26) about Speaker 3 (1:27) that? Speaker 2 (1:28) All right, for those of you who don't know Tiffany, Tiffany has spent nearly 30 years inside some of the biggest evolutions in tech. As Salesforce's former growth and innovation evangelist, research fellow at Gartner, and now chief strategy and research officer at Futurum Group. So thrilled to be here with you talking about your book. One of my favorite parts of your book is how you open it. I mean, you've written more than one book, but today we're talking about the experience mindset. But one of the things that I really love is that you... Offer yourself some critical feedback as you open up the experience mindset about how you failed to write as much in the past as you wish you had about the impact of the employee experience on the customer experience. So say more about that. Speaker 3 (2:19) Yeah, I was radically honest with myself. Yes, Speaker 2 (2:23) you're radically candid. Speaker 3 (2:25) With myself. It was self-awareness and radically candid simultaneously. So my first book, Growth IQ, was sort of like a cult. culmination of my practitioner operational experience, right? Running sales, marketing, and service in tech. Then 10 years at Gartner, right? Advising startups all the way to the largest, you know, number one largest tech company in the world. And I felt like I had a good handle. Speaker 2 (2:50) Yeah. Speaker 3 (2:50) Right. To put it mildly. I felt like I had a good handle on it. I never believe I knew everything. I mean, obviously, but I felt like I had a good handle on it. And I really spent time on what are the buckets of ways to grow. And after thousands of conversations and literally, right. You know, over the course of, of a decade, I felt like I'd landed on the 10 and the very first one was customer experience. It was like, right. I was part of the team that made the prediction that the CMO would spend more on tech than the CIO back in 2008. And when we said that, everyone thought we were crazy. And you were right. Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, others all went out and bought technology companies to get their hands on that marketing spend that CMOs were now going to be spending. And it was not for technology. It was really about this customer experience. Right. Right? And so I was all in. Like, yeah, this this is it. So it was my number one path. I started there. Right. The whole nine yards. And then I started working at Salesforce. And then I was standing on stage one day and I said, I didn't think it was a coincidence that at the time when I say we right at the time, we were one of the best places to work globally, one of the most innovative companies in the world and the fastest growing enterprise software company. Right. I didn't think that was a coincidence. So I went to our CMO and I said, could I prove this? And that sort of put me down this path of all the research that we did for experience mindset. Well, now I'm like three months, four months into it. And I'm like, oh my God. Right. I go back to growth IQ and I'm like, let me just do a quick search. How many times did I say the word employee? And I'm like, wah, wah. You know what Speaker 2 (4:25) I Speaker 3 (4:25) mean? Like not Speaker 2 (4:26) as many as you had wished. Speaker 3 (4:27) Not as many as I thought I, you know, I should have had considering I thought I had it nailed. So this was kind of a mea culpa. I had no intention, as you know, Kim, like to write another book. It was not like on my bucket list. Yeah. And then I found myself with this information and I said, I would be, I would be remiss that I, I needed to go back and do this mea culpa. So that was the story of the self-reflection of this is kind of the 11th path. Right. That I Speaker 2 (4:54) didn't write in the first book. Right, right, right. And you have such a good, you have such, I love a good framework. And you have a great framework at the core of your book, showing sort of how people, process, technology, and culture all combine to create this experience mindset. So let's just, let's walk through it. Let's start with people. You have this incredible stat that, of course, caught my eye. 87 % of executives don't know what to do with the employee feedback that they collect. And employees who give feedback that goes nowhere conclude that their executives don't listen or don't care or both. So what is going on? Yeah. So let me, let me qualify a little bit. I am not a Speaker 3 (5:42) people expert. So I look at people in a very specific lens at the moment that matters when a employee touches a customer in some way. Right. The obvious are sales marketing service, right? But it could be. A web designer, because you're touching a customer via a digital website or an app. It could be the packaging team that builds the package for a product you've built. Like that all touches a customer. So don't just think customer facing. So I focused on that moment that matters. So now let me go back, right, to what you just asked. That you are correct. That people feel like, leaders feel like when they do these surveys that they're satisfying that, well, we do a survey. Yeah. Like, right? And they tell us, and I'm like, okay, well. What did you do with that? What did you do with it? Speaker 2 (6:28) And I Speaker 3 (6:28) was shocked at the answer. But then I always, and I use this in the book. I used it in both books, actually. I used the Undercover Boss television show as just my reality check. Yeah. That there is a perfect live example of. Right. I'm guessing they all do surveys, you know, and I'm sure that their employees are telling them these things. And so people want to feel heard. They want to feel like their opinion matters. They want to feel like ideas can come from anywhere. And I think this was my way of showing these very illuminating statistics from the research. And this was global, by the way. Speaker 2 (7:04) Yes. Speaker 3 (7:05) Regardless of size and region and industry. So this is not just a U.S. thing or a Europe thing. It was global. Some countries were better than others. But for the mean, it was not a good look. Speaker 2 (7:16) Yes. I love the undercover CEO. So explain for folks who are not familiar what happened in that story. Speaker 3 (7:24) Yeah, Speaker 2 (7:24) so Speaker 3 (7:24) Undercover Boss is a U.S. show and a U.K. show, and I don't know if it's in Canada and other places, but I know it's in the U.S. and the U.K. And the whole concept is, right, a CEO does something shocking. Speaker 2 (7:36) Yeah. Leave their office. Speaker 3 (7:39) And they wander amongst the people. Speaker 2 (7:41) Yes. Speaker 3 (7:43) In the wild. Speaker 2 (7:44) Yeah. And they experienced the truth firsthand. They are Speaker 3 (7:47) at the edges. Yes. And everything happens at the edge. Yeah. Growth happens. Think about an iceberg. Growth happens at the edge. It melts at the edge. Yes. Speaker 2 (7:57) Right? Speaker 3 (7:58) So the edge is the people, the front lines that could be, depending how big you are, right? They could be a hundred levels below the CEO. They could be two levels below the CEO. Right? Right. But as companies get bigger, leaders get further and further away from the edge. Speaker 2 (8:12) And so undercover boss does this, you know, they put on a disguise of the CEO in the first three Speaker 3 (8:17) or four minutes of very expensive primetime U S television. And, and I'm like, it's such a waste because no one would recognize them anyway, because they never leave their office. Right. Right. Right. But the whole concept is that they go out and talk to the people. They mop the floors and clean the toilets and empty the trash and use the technology and use the app and organize the utility closet and go through the inventory. And they do all these things that they probably have never done. Now, some CEOs have moved up the ranks through the company over decades. That's less common today, right? Yeah. So normally people are bouncing around. And once they get to leadership, they rarely go back down. Right? Yeah. And so for me, I think the management by wandering around, which is Tom Peters in Search of Excellence. Speaker 2 (9:07) And also Abraham Lincoln, I think, was a little bit as well. And Speaker 3 (9:12) Tom used it from Bill Hewitt, from Hewlett Packard, that he would go to the manufacturing plant. So you hear Ford say those things. Costco, Southwest, where these CEOs are like always out. They're out. Right? And so it sends multiple messages. I get to have a conversation with the CEO. They heard me. They listened and maybe even actioned something that was my suggestion. I'm all in. Like when times get tough and they ask me to buckle up and work a little longer or pick up an extra shift, I'm in. I'm committed. I'm aligned. I believe you had me at hello, right? Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 (9:48) It's so good. It's really interesting. One of the things that I, when I was at... Google that I would struggle to do is make sure that I was still answering customer, but I managed a team that did a lot of things, but chief among them was customer support work, that I was actually answering some tickets. And that was important because I then, when people came to me with suggestions, understood why it mattered because I had struggled with. So when somebody came to me and said, we need programmable keypads, I understood why they needed programmable keypads. But the other thing that happened when I did that was that somebody came up to me and very kindly and gently said, Kim, you know, I wish you'd quit grabbing tickets because you're not doing a good job answering them. And you're hurting my... You know, you're hurting my customer satisfaction metrics. And so, you know, it's important, I think, to go in and be humble, but to figure out, like, what would you have advised me in that situation? Like, should I stop doing the tickets? Should I have my own cue? I would almost Speaker 3 (11:01) take it Speaker 2 (11:02) as Speaker 3 (11:02) a learning moment. So let's just say you were a regular employee and the answers weren't very good. Yeah. Like, what is the problem? So I would go, okay, I hear you. Thank you. What is my way forward? Like what would be, if I were in, you know, if this were my job, right? Because clearly you were jumping in, which I love, but it wasn't your day job. I agree that it has value. But then, you know, you could have said, so what would that, what would happen if I were, this was my job and quality was low? What's the next step? Like, do you put me through a training? Do I have to shadow people? Like, let me do that. So you just kind of keep going down the process, which I think goes back to this. How would a leader know if you just stop doing it? Then what you've just said is if someone isn't doing a good job, the company would just fire them. Maybe that is in fact true. I don't know. But the point being that you would have learned more Speaker 2 (12:02) had you said, tell me more. How can I get better? Like, what can I do? Yeah. Then I could have learned about the training. Correct. Because it's like these things are very rarely common sense. You need to learn how to answer the questions correctly. Yep. You need training. And so let's talk for a minute about training. You have one of the quotes that you have that I love is some leader will say, well, what if I pay? to train them and then they leave. And what is your response to that? What if you don't train them and they stay? Yes, exactly. Yeah. That is the right answer because they're not doing as good a job as they could be doing if you would invest in them. Well, just like your example. Yeah. Like I wasn't, I wasn't, I was very well-meaning. But I wasn't doing a good job answering the questions because I hadn't been properly trained. Okay, so you could have kept going and provided Speaker 3 (13:04) really bad customer service. Yeah, or I could have gotten trained. Or you could have gotten trained, right? And now they could say, well, we want to hire people that are already trained. It's like, okay, well, you might be able to hire a customer service rep from another company and that you're hiring them for a customer service role in your company. But that doesn't mean they're going to do a good job in your company. Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:26) They didn't know the AdSense product. Like you have to learn it. Speaker 3 (13:29) You have to learn it. Right. And you don't know our systems and you don't know our processes. You don't know our escalations and our approvals and you don't know our billing system, whatever. It is not the same. And, and they don't know your customers. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And Speaker 2 (13:44) so that needs, all that needs to be trained. All Speaker 3 (13:47) that needs to Speaker 2 (13:48) be Speaker 3 (13:48) trained. And when I was selling technology. I will tell you, I was just having this conversation with someone. That was the number one budget line item that would get cut when we were selling very large technology transformations. It could be million-dollar like... you know, some software, right, for the legal industry or some, you know, this is back in the, you know, late 90s, early 2000s. We were selling things. And I was selling multimillion-dollar projects or half-a-million-dollar projects. And then it might be $50,000 to $200,000 in training. That would always get cut. Yes. And then they would come back to me and be like, gosh, we're just not seeing the ROI. You know, Tiffany, everything you said that our attorneys or our whatever would be able to do, they're not doing. I'm like. Well, have they been trained? Well, yeah, we gave them a half an hour, you know, lunch and learn. I'm like, okay. You've just asked them to completely change the way they work. They've manually tracked hours for some of them decades. And now you're telling them to push in their phone the client number, and it will track how much time they were on the phone, and then they need to do something else. And you're trying to change your behavior. And while you're now recouping all this extra money, they don't know how to do it or they forget how to do it or their secretary does it or their legal does it. So you know what I mean? Like I give that as a