Manage Your Human Sigma
 | HBR OnPoint Enhanced EditionBy John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman, James K. Harter Harvard Business Review, 2005, Digital |
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If sales and service organizations are to improve, they must learn to measure and manage the quality of the employee-customer encounter. Quality improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma are extremely useful in manufacturing contexts, but they're less useful when it comes to human interactions. To address this problem, the authors have developed a quality improvement approach they refer to as Human Sigma. It weaves together a consistent method for assessing the employee-customer encounter and a disciplined process for managing and improving it. There are several core principles for measuring and managing the employee-customer encounter: It's important not to think like an economist or an engineer when assessing interactions because emotions inform both sides' judgments and behavior. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed locally. And to improve the quality of the employee-customer interaction, organizations must conduct both short-term, transactional interventions and long-term, transformational ones. Employee engagement and customer engagement are intimately connected — and, taken together, they have an outsized effect on financial performance. They, therefore, need to be managed holistically. That is, the responsibility for measuring and monitoring the health of employee-customer relationships must reside within a single organizational structure, with an executive champion who has the authority to initiate and manage change. Nevertheless, the local manager remains the single most important factor in local group performance.
Title: Manage Your Human Sigma (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)
Sales Rank: 151028 in Books
Author: John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman, James K. Harter
Publisher: Harvard Business Review, 2005-07-01, Digital, 11 pages
- An alternative measure for the employee-customer encounter
- John H. Fleming is Chief Scientist for customer engagement, Curt Coffman is a Global Practice Leader, and James K. Harter is the Chief Scientist for employee engagement at the Gallup Organization. This article was published in a special issue of the Harvard Business Review in July-August 2005, which focused on the high-performance organization.
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