The Customer Mission Andrea Olson

Job interviews are mostly nonsense. According to Ron Friedman, a psychologist and author of “The Best Place to Work", 80% of people lie during their interviews — so if that's the case, the information you’re hearing is likely fiction, or at best, inspired by real-world events. Job interviews mean you may hire the best actor on the day — not the best candidate. So don’t do them.


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· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

I had a conversation with an organization who was needing to grow their membership numbers, and they were struggling to find ways to get things moving forward. They had just restructured their organizational processes, with a strong focus on performance metrics for each and every department. The thought was, with more transparency, they'd have more insight as to whether everyone was working together to 'move the needle'.

However, tracking activities of departments is very different from measuring those things which directly influence and impact the goal of increasing membership levels. The organization was tracking things like 'number of social media posts weekly' and 'number of newsletters sent monthly' - both of which presumably intended to increase potential member engagement, but the problem was, these activities weren't doing anything to change membership numbers. Why?


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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

What's your job? Does it match the description? Does it make the best use of your skills and talents? Does your job diverge dramatically from the role you actually do to generate value for the organization? Here's the question - do we need job descriptions? More specifically, do we need job descriptions in the way we construct them today?


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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

If you Google "Employee Engagement" and look for images representing it, you'll find groups of people in business attire smiling, high-fiving, laughing, or conducting some other staged behavior. While it may look a bit comical, somewhere in the recesses of our minds, we want to replicate this feeling with our own staff. We associated happiness with engagement, and often try to fill the void with a series of initiatives and activities to 'engage' people, from free pizza and bagels, holding off-site meetings, and giving out swag, to public recognition of high performers.

We've all done these things at one point or another. However, does this really build employee engagement?


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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

We all are faced with a myriad of business problems that every organization wants to be solved quickly and easily. We know not every problem is the same, and we know that some problems are more complex than others. We also know that some problems might be expensive to solve, and some might take a lot of time and resources. However, many organizations actually hinder their ability to solve these problems by defining the problem incorrectly, and inherently, defining an incorrect solution.


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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Executives say that cultural challenges — not technological ones — represent the biggest impediment around data initiatives.

In a 2021 survey from NewVantage Partners, 92.2% of mainstream companies report that they continue to struggle with cultural challenges relating to organizational alignment, business processes, change management, communication, people skill sets, and resistance or lack of understanding to enable change. This represents an increase from an already high percentage of 80.9% of firms that named cultural challenges as the greatest impediment to success just four years ago.

If we've known this for a while, why are organizations continuing to struggle with becoming more data-driven?


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This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app