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Do you have any company initiatives that you can’t seem to make measurable traction against? Does your company fall victim to the fallacy of appealing to tradition (“that’s the way we’ve always done it”) or the fallacy of complacency (“if it isn’t broke don’t fix it”)?
Whichever of these apply to your business, one thing is certain, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got…or worse. Your competitors WILL change. So as Jack Welch (and probably Jack Donaghy) said, “Change before you have to.”
But the question is always what to change. You don’t want to change for the sake of change, and you may not have a clear perspective regarding which changes will produce the desired results. This is where companies like SOLV(X) can help by providing another set of eyes.
Successful companies in today’s world are largely successful because they can balance the needs of their stakeholders, their employees, and their customers. But even good companies can occasionally fail to see the world through all three lenses. Great companies not only embrace change, they proactively seek change.
SOLV(X) uses a combination of data analytics, employee perspective, and customer journey mapping to help you identify your most meaningful improvement opportunities. We can be that other set of eyes. We can help to identify and quantify opportunities that even successful companies cannot.
In our most recent example, SOLV(X) was hired by a client seeking to improve the quantity and quality of its most important asset, its people. This is a two-decade-old company that has had enormous success, especially over the past several years. Continuous improvement is in their DNA, and they have successfully transformed and grown their business at a rate much faster than their competitors. They knew they could do more, but they also knew that they needed help.
Knowing that this client’s biggest challenge was the need to hire and retain significantly more people to keep up with demand, we utilized four specific tactics to identify the root cause and associated solutions. These tactics were to (1) analyze, (2) interview, (3) observe (through the employees' eyes), and (4) observe again (through the candidates' eyes).
The first step was to apply business analytics to identify the choke points within their recruiting process. This client had tens of thousands of applicants over the past several months, but they only hired a very small percentage of these applicants. The vast majority of applicants voluntarily fell out during the recruiting and onboarding processes.
The second step was to talk to the people on the ground who are responsible for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding. As you can expect, these folks all had great perspectives regarding why such a high percentage of people fell out.
Following the interviews, we observed these employees in action, shadowing them as they performed their core job responsibilities. We saw a clear connection between the opportunities that they had mentioned during our discussions and how these aligned with their tasks, processes, and tools.
The final step was to have “secret shoppers” go through their application and onboarding process. As we observed the friction that these applicants experienced, it connected several of the dots from the prior three steps.
You might be asking yourself, “Why do I need to hire a company like SOLV(X) to do these things? Can’t we do them ourselves?” These are fair questions. However, what we usually find (even in successful companies) is that we offer an outside-looking-in perspective, and we have a unique variety of experiences, tools, and techniques which enable us to effectively look behind the curtain to identify the true root causes and identify impactful solutions.
Since this initial engagement, SOLV(X) has been retained by this client to implement a combination of process, structure, tools, and technology solutions that will take them to the next level. The improvements are planned over three phases, “crawl”, “walk”, and “run”. In this instance, the crawl phase is already being successfully implemented by the client. They are implementing the low-hanging fruit changes that are fast and low-cost and (just a couple of weeks in) they are already seeing immediate results.
In parallel, SOLV(X) is working with them on the “walk” and “run” phases. These are the things that will take a bit more time and resources but have significant returns on investment. This includes streamlining and automating some of their most repeatable and important core processes to improve the applicant experience and produce a much higher yield.
We are excited to partner with this client on their journey, and we predict significantly improved business results through improved hiring and retention, decreased cost, and increased client and employee satisfaction. Are you looking for similar results? We suspect that you are, and we would love to be your fresh set of eyes.