How To Create Your Own Opportunities At Work

Do You Have Any Questions for Me?

“Do you have any questions for me?”  Don’t get stumped by this common interview question! Answer “no”, and you might as well start looking for another job. So why do interviewers ask if you have any questions? They want to find out three important things:

1. Did you do your homework about the position and the company?
2. Are you really interested in the job?
3. How are your conversational skills and thought processes?

And, since you could possibly be working at this company, it’s in your best interest to ask as many questions as possible so that you know exactly what to expect. Here are some examples of what you might want to ask…

To find out more about the company:

• Where do you see the company headed?
• What will the company be like five years from now?
• Can you describe the company culture?
• How do you stay ahead of the competition?
• Where do you see this industry headed?
• What is turnover like?

Interviewer questions:

• What do you like about working here?
• How long have you been working here?
• If you could change or improve anything, what would it be?

To find out more about your position:

• Is this a new position? If so, why was this position created?
• Describe a typical work week/day in this position.
• How many people work in this department?
• Can you show me an organizational structure chart or give me an idea about the chain of command?
• How will my performance be measured? By whom?
• Will I be given periodic reviews?
• How would you describe the responsibilities of this position?
• What is the management style like?
• What are the opportunities for advancement?
• What is the company’s policy on providing seminars, workshops, and training so employees can keep up their skills or acquire new ones?

Work-life balance and other expectations:

• How much travel is expected?
• What are the typical hours like?
• Is overtime expected?
• Is relocation a possibility?

Follow-up questions:

• If I am offered a position, when would I be expected to start?
• What are the next steps in the hiring process?
• When should I expect that you’d be making your decision?
• Is there anything else that you’d like to know?

And NEVER ask these questions:

• Questions that can easily be answered by checking the employer’s website or any other literature that has been provided to you before the interview.
• Salary and benefit information, unless the employer brings up the topic.

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Listen to Your Employees, Not Just Your Customers

by Beth Benjamin
Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2016/08/listen-to-your-employees-not-just-your-customers
August 15, 2016

In 2014, Michael Callahan, then head of customer experience at Hulu, had a mystery on his hands. When the big video streaming service surveyed customers who renewed subscriptions, it discovered, paradoxically, that some customers stayed with Hulu even when they didn’t necessarily have a positive perception of the brand overall.

It turned out that some customer service representatives of the third-largest player in the streaming video space were pushing fence-sitting customers too hard, said Callahan in a recent interview. Paid digital TV companies, which also include Netflix and Amazon Prime, face high churn. Like Hulu, they need to ensure positive perceptions among customers routinely up for grabs between the big players.

“We had a gut-check conversation to discover what it meant to truly serve customers,” Callahan remembers. “We wanted employees to act more authentically to achieve a better, more positive experience of the brand overall. We didn’t want them only thinking about retention.”

That’s when Callahan’s team took an unusual step: The team created and linked an employee feedback system to its customer feedback system, in order to flag interactions where customers and employees had different perceptions. The linked system consisted of two short surveys — one sent to employees and the other to customers — right after a transaction. The linked system allowed for more insight into customers, and managers could use the information to coach employees, to assess whether they had the right tools and resources, and to identify people with innovative ideas and leadership potential.

Many companies love customer feedback, but only a handful have devoted as much energy to employee feedback systems. “For every dollar spent on employee feedback, companies spend hundreds of dollars on customer feedback,” said Troy Stevenson, former vice president of customer loyalty at eBay, in a recent interview.

Companies rarely connect the two systems. But, connecting them can create powerful feedback loops that engage employees and help companies adapt to fast-changing customer expectations, according to new research I conducted with my colleagues Carolyn Egelman, Julia Markish, Emma Sopadjieva, and Dorian Stone at the Medallia Institute. The research included interviews with more than 25 customer experience and HR executives and a survey of 1,000 frontline employees working at large companies in the U.S. automotive, financial services, retail, telecomm, and hospitality sectors.

Linking feedback systems allows companies to enlist frontline employees as agents of change. In our Medallia Institute survey, 56% of frontline employees said they have suggestions for improving company practices, and 43% said their insights could reduce company costs. Yet, a third said they were surveyed once a year or less, and more than half said employers weren’t asking the right questions.

In the case Callahan described, two screen pop-up surveys were sent to customers and employees immediately following a customer service transaction.

Customers were asked:
•Was your problem solved?
•Are we easy to work with?
•Did you enjoy the experience you just had?

Employees were asked:

•Did you solve the problem?
•Was it easy to access the tools and resources you needed to solve the problem?
•Did you feel proud to represent our brand in the conversation?

The linked feedback system prompted executives to adjust the compensation plan: customer service representatives received a retention bonus only if a subscriber remained on the rolls 30 days after an interaction.

Reducing customer churn by even a small amount can add up to a lot in a subscription-based business. For example, if linked feedback loops helped to improve retention by even one percentage point, the savings on a subscriber base of 12 million (Hulu’s current base) with a typical monthly subscription price of $7.99, would generate an extra $11 million in annual revenue.

Why don’t more companies do this? Organizational barriers are often the culprit. At one 170,000-employee big box retailer, linking the feedback systems would require approvals from three different senior executives, the CMO, the chief human resources officer, and the president of retail. The only person who could drive a linked system was the CEO.

Companies that want the insights from linked systems can navigate the organizational complexities with these six steps:

Align feedback systems around high-level business objectives. Which needle do you want to move? Hulu wanted to build more authentic relationships with customers. This drove everything from its questions to how it used the data.

Design your feedback system to aggregate data at key touchpoints. Most companies build separate, often expensive systems within existing reporting hierarchies. Instead, work backwards from the customer experiences you want to understand. For example, if your customer feedback is organized around touchpoints within lines of business, survey employees who interact with customers at those same touchpoints, such as a call center conversation or an account signup. Companies often make the mistake of organizing customer feedback systems around one structure — say lines of business or channel — and employee feedback systems around another — say geography or function.

Establish the right frequency and pacing for employee and customer surveys. Many companies, including Nordstrom, Four Seasons and Vanguard, collect customer feedback on a continuous basis and distribute it in real time (Disclosure: Nordstrom, Four Seasons, and Vanguard are all clients of Medallia). Most executives I interviewed said employees should be surveyed more than once a year but not more than once a month. Match the timing of your surveys to the pace at which you can act, so that you can demonstrate results. Surveying employees on a rolling basis, and using quarantine rules (designated times when you won’t ask for feedback) for customer surveys can minimize survey fatigue.

Encourage honest feedback and protect employees who answer candidly. Employees may worry their feedback will get them into trouble. Counter this perception by rewarding and honoring employees for raising difficult issues. After successes become clear, give even more recognition to employees whose feedback helped move the company forward.

Let people speak in their own words and capture emotional cues. As companies rely more on technology, relating to customers emotionally and pinpointing what troubles them gets trickier. Open-ended questions, text analytics and sentiment analysis capture interactions more vividly and compel leaders to act. “To hear an employee who’s deeply empathetic to the customer trying to explain a complex policy … to feel them struggle is painful,” says Callahan, who is now at Seattle-based Blueprint Consulting Services.

Act on the most important feedback, and communicate what you’re doing and why. In our interviews, we learned that a handful of companies are using feedback to create specific action plans tied to companies’ broader goals. At one company, executives use an internal website to post plans that grew out of employee feedback. Employees can see who’s leading an effort, view timelines, and track progress. They can also share additional feedback or volunteer for projects.

In a world where big data algorithms and technology increasingly dictate the customer experience, linked feedback systems give companies at least two great advantages. The connections help senior managers get a more complete picture of customer-employee interactions, including the behaviors — and emotions — they generate. And, asking employees for their input, not through a pro forma annual survey but as part of the company’s routine operations, sends a signal that employees have useful insights and that they are valued.

Ultimately, well-designed feedback loops enable employees to be more empowered and companies to be more responsive, creating the competitive edge companies need to adapt and thrive.

Beth Benjamin is senior director of research at Medallia, a global provider of customer experience management software. She applies organizational science to real-world problems, helping companies to adapt to the challenges of growth and market change.

How to Beat Procrastination?  Procrastination comes in many disguises. We might resolve to tackle a task, but find endless reasons to defer it. We might prioritize things we can readily tick off our to-do list—answering emails, say—while leaving the big, complex stuff untouched for another day. We can look and feel busy, while artfully avoiding the tasks that really matter. And when we look at those rolling, long-untouched items at the bottom of our to-do list, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed in ourselves.

The problem is our brains are programmed to procrastinate. In general, we all tend to struggle with tasks that promise future upside in return for efforts we take now. That’s because it’s easier for our brains to process concrete rather than abstract things, and the immediate hassle is very tangible compared with those unknowable, uncertain future benefits. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds—an example of something that behavioral scientists call present bias.

How can you become less myopic about your elusive tasks? It’s all about rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis: make the benefits of action feel bigger, and the costs of action feel smaller. The reward for doing a pestering task needs to feel larger than the immediate pain of tackling it.

To make the benefits of action feel bigger and more real:

Visualize how great it will be to get it done. Researchers have discovered that people are more likely to save for their future retirement if they’re shown digitally aged photographs of themselves. Why? Because it makes their future self feel more real—making the future benefits of saving also feel more weighty. When we apply a lo-fi version of this technique to any task we’ve been avoiding, by taking a moment to paint ourselves a vivid mental picture of the benefits of getting it done, it can sometimes be just enough to get us unstuck. So if there’s a call you’re avoiding or an email you’re putting off, give your brain a helping hand by imagining the virtuous sense of satisfaction you’ll have once it’s done—and perhaps also the look of relief on someone’s face as they get from you what they needed.

Pre-commit, publicly. Telling people that we’re going to get something done can powerfully amplify the appeal of actually taking action, because our brain’s reward system is so highly responsive to our social standing. Research has found that it matters greatly to us whether we’re respected by others—even by strangers. Most of us don’t want to look foolish or lazy to other people. So by daring to say “I’ll send you the report by the end of the day” we add social benefits to following through on our promise—which can be just enough to nudge us to bite the bullet.

Confront the downside of inaction. Research has found that we’re strangely averse to properly evaluating the status quo. While we might weigh the pros and cons of doing something new, we far less often consider the pros and cons of not doing that thing. Known as omission bias, this often leads us to ignore some obvious benefits of getting stuff done. Suppose you’re repeatedly putting off the preparation you need to do for an upcoming meeting. You’re tempted by more exciting tasks, so you tell yourself you can do it tomorrow (or the day after). But force yourself to think about the downside of putting it off, and you realize that tomorrow will be too late to get hold of the input you really need from colleagues. If you get moving now, you have half a chance of reaching them in time—so finally, your gears creak into action.

To make the costs of action feel smaller:

Identify the first step. Sometimes we’re just daunted by the task we’re avoiding. We might have “learn French” on our to-do list, but who can slot that into the average afternoon? The trick here is to break down big, amorphous tasks into baby steps that don’t feel as effortful. Even better: identify the very smallest first step, something that’s so easy that even your present-biased brain can see that the benefits outweigh the costs of effort. So instead of “learn French” you might decide to “email Nicole to ask advice on learning French.” Achieve that small goal, and you’ll feel more motivated to take the next small step than if you’d continued to beat yourself up about your lack of language skills.

Tie the first step to a treat. We can make the cost of effort feel even smaller if we link that small step to something we’re actually looking forward to doing. In other words, tie the task that we’re avoiding to something that we’re not avoiding. For example, you might allow yourself to read lowbrow magazines or books when you’re at the gym, because the guilty pleasure helps dilute your brain’s perception of the short-term “cost” of exercising. Likewise, you might muster the self-discipline to complete a slippery task if you promise yourself you’ll do it in a nice café with a favorite drink in hand.

Remove the hidden blockage. Sometimes we find ourselves returning to a task repeatedly, still unwilling to take the first step. We hear a little voice in our head saying, “Yeah, good idea, but . . . no.” At this point, we need to ask that voice some questions, to figure out what’s really making it unappealing to take action. This doesn’t necessarily require psychotherapy. Patiently ask yourself a few “why” questions—“why does it feel tough to do this?” and “why’s that?”—and the blockage can surface quite quickly. Often, the issue is that a perfectly noble competing commitment is undermining your motivation. For example, suppose you were finding it hard to stick to an early morning goal-setting routine. A few “whys” might highlight that the challenge stems from your equally strong desire to eat breakfast with your family. Once you’ve made that conflict more explicit, it’s far more likely you’ll find a way to overcome it—perhaps by setting your daily goals the night before, or on your commute into work.

So the next time you find yourself mystified by your inability to get important tasks done, be kind to yourself. Recognize that your brain needs help if it’s going to be less short-sighted. Try taking at least one step to make the benefits of action loom larger, and one to make the costs of action feel smaller. Your languishing to-do list will thank you.

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