Thomas Koeppen Blog

Many companies have historically utilized transactional-based business strategies and have

established a litany of processes to ensure their success. These companies do not encourage

innovation and choose to rely on processes as a highly controlled mechanism to address predefined

problems.

In these environments, the concept of employee ownership rarely exists and each function is simply responsible for another element of the process. An employee who transfers a call to another department is absolved from any responsibility the moment the call is transferred.

Companies operating in this framework do not trust their employees to utilize common sense, and

evaluate them almost completely on their adherence to the rules.

However, a growing number of companies have recognized the limitations and devastating consequences of this approach and have begun adapting their processes in the framework of right now business strategies.

Although process redesign and the elimination of restrictive procedures can assist organizations with the execution of a right now business strategy, their efforts cannot stop there.

Companies must reevaluate the role of their processes and recognize that processes should function only to empower employees so that they can provide customers with customized and timely experiences.

Processes should encourage employees to resolve out of the box problems, use common sense, accept greater responsibility and deliver faster problem resolutions. However, even flexible processes will never yield positive results if organizations fail to provide their employees with the ability to recognize when flexibility and out of the box thinking is warranted.

This requires that companies educate their employees on the economics of customer relationships so that they can understand crucial concepts such as life time value of the customer, customer spending habits and product margins.

Armed with the relevant information, employees will be able to apply their knowledge, customize experiences and deliver more financially impressive results.

Many organizations will never succeed at trusting their employees, placing them atop of the

organizational pyramid and adapting to the new distribution of power. CEOs and management will

often refuse to accept or utilize this shift in power.

Rather, they will revert to running their businesses according to the old rules, hoping that a few cosmetic exercises will suffice and that customers will never be the wiser.