bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

Managers are having difficulty managing Gen Y.

There are tonnes of reasons why, one that’s no so obvious though is the need for high feedback loops.

Everything around Gen Y has instant feedback, Google, Taking a photo, Playstation.  The one place that isn’t prevalent is the workplace.

It’s actually amazing that here’s a generation that actively seeks and wants feedback so that they can improve!

Don’t get frustrated, work with it and you’ll reap the rewards.

I was watching foundat.io/n earlier today and Philip Rosedale (founder of SecondLife) was on talking about a survey he runs every quarter.

The survey collects anonymous responses to these questions:
1) Do you think I should remain as CEO or be replaced?
2) Regardless of the above have I improved / gotten worse at my job?
3) Why?

Philip then relays the numbers of the first two questions back to the team. With the insight that at some point he should leave the role as CEO and at that point he probably won’t want to go but the trend of the numbers won’t lie.

Secondly he would sit down and review the Why responses (after a couple of drinks). It is easy to brush off feedback when it comes from someone you know but when (as he says) you get the same feedback from seven different employees who don’t know one another you can’t argue with that.

Are you brave enough to collect and take feedback?

It’s a classic case of just holding your breath and doing it. The feedback helps everyone, those you ask, you and your company. We do it for our customers and it was amazing to hear three different customers give us the same feedback. Like Philip said it is a universal truth when you hear it in that manner.

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Note: Foundat.io/n videos are released once a month, if you are a subscriber (like me) you get them early. Watch the Foundation Vimeo channel for the video to come out.

Do you do a Microsoft and ask what customers want? Or do you do an Apple and tell them what they want?

These are two sides of the equation that people often flip between or have difficulty deciding on what’s right.

The thing you need to take into account is the market state.

What is the state of the market?

If you’re the big player you want to listen to your customers, keep them happy, you have a lot to cater for.

If you’re the small guy you can’t compete on that basis, you need to figure out tangents which you can take the customer that help make you big.

What makes an idea worth sharing? The fact that you’re asking the question.

Everyone has a voice.

Whether you hear it or not is another thing BUT you can decide who you listen to.

The 1% rule online dictates that 1 in 100 people will place a comment.  As a blogger these are the people you tend to listen to.  However what about the other 99?

The same goes for negative comments, if you hear 20 good comments and one negative you tend to focus on that one.

Remember to make sure that you are listening to the right people.

What does Ben do? Well that’s a very ambiguous question.

I am an author, a blogger and most prominently an entrepreneur.  Day to day I deliver Marketing Strategy to startups (which pays the bills).

However I am working on something new, slowly but surely, a new marketing business model.

As I work on it, the opportunity has arisen to work with me, in a marketing capacity.

My specialty is strategy, a unique arrangement of tactics to rapidly achieve goals.

The model (whilst still in development) will focus around:

• DIY: Whereby strategies are shared with you to implement yourself.  A cost effective (and smart to those that are committed) way of leveraging experienced intellectual property.
• Standardised Services: Hands on services to stimulate growth, whilst more pricey you buy the reassurance of having someone else responsible for objectives.
• Super High Level, Ultra NON-scalable, get me to turn up services.  This is going to be very limited as my time is super scarce.

With my continual focus on leverage, the smartest way to create the biggest impact is to provide services which can scale very quickly (and globally) overnight.  Thus the DIY component is of vital importance to me.

I need your feedback (to help me help you guys)

What I would like to do is poll you guys on firstly as the challenge for me is to figure out what intellectual property I hold from my experience that you can leverage.  As I live inside my own mind the best way is to ask you.

I have created a survey here, it is only five questions and shouldn’t take more than a minute to fill out.  The responses from will help me help you.  Any help or feedback you can provide would be incredibly valued.

Also you know what really gets me excited about this? The ability to leverage my knowledge to create massive change but also the second tier change it can create.

10% of any zero variable cost services bwagy offers I set aside for Kiva.  Over time I would like to build this pool of funds to form bwagy.org into a charitable trust – to help stimulate entrepreneurship around the world.  (Another form of my leverage focus). Thus a leveraging approach helps achieve this.

Get me in

Finally if you happen to be local and would like me to come in and speak with your organisation, provide an organisational hand grenade or just provide an independent view on your approach send me an email.

Please get in contact I really want to build something significant here of which you can be a part of.

Summary

• Am available to help your organisation, email me [email protected] and have a chat.
• Working on something new and need your feedback, please take the poll here.
• You can hire me to come talk to your organisation, email [email protected]

Thanks guys, please enjoy the weekend, -Ben

A while back as a Monday Ideas Post I shared my idea for a quick feedback form, you can view the original post here and the republished post on the NZHerald (where it was hugely controversial).

As a quick summary I suggested that stores add a device to collect quick feedback on your experience.  You could even integrate into the eftpos machine to hasten the process.

I was delighted to be greeted by this in a duty free store whilst away on holiday.

How neat! A quick screen to let me provide some simple feedback.  From the state of the machine I could tell it was well used.

Airports are a double sided coin as customers are only likely to visit a few times, so it’s harder to collect feedback (but you have a location monopoly so average service can prevail).

Some readers mentioned they had seen some in the original post but just wanted to share…

Shopping at a local supermarket on Sunday I received great service from a new checkout person.  It was at that moment I thought, why don’t they have a simple touch machine where after the transaction you can rate the service, 1 to 5 stars.  I would have loved to give her five stars.

Imagine that, a small touch screen device, where you can rate the service in a second.  The system then records the rating and at the end of the day the staff member gets their average rating.

Staff realise:

• They are instantly accountable
• Provides a benchmark to lift the bar
• Real time rankings by the hour (look at peaks and troughs during the day)

For the service provider:

• Instant feedback on staff
• Reward the best staff
• Compare satisfaction by time of day
• Get the real picture of what your customers think of your service
• Stimulate a cultural change in customer satisfaction, sending the right signals to staff and to customers

And for customers:

• Feel the respect for opinion
• Can reward outstanding service by giving five stars
• Feel valued
• Makes them consciously think about the level of customer service provided

Not sure on the cost but it would be worth a try! This one little thing could change the whole customer service experience.

(Extra for experts: You already realise people are doing this on twitter (see here) and will continue to do so.  Bit of a no brainer.  Embrace the change)