The severity of COVID infection seems to be waning, vaccination and antibodies are both on the rise, and employees are now more likely to be in the office and emotionally engaged than in the past two years. Those of us who are still here are the determined ones. We’ve escaped mortal danger that earlier waves of the pandemic caused at scale. We’ve navigated ‘The Great Resignation’ – the exploration of purpose and meaning by employees – and have either already made a career move or have decided to stay… both very powerful mindset and career stances.

As the great return to normality unfolds, it’s a good idea for businesses both large and small to consider two key themes for survival and growth in 2022 – Employee Relevance and Customer Value.

Employee Relevance

We don’t merely work for money these days. We need meaning, alignment, a deeper sense of involvement, accountability, respect, belonging, recognition, purpose and joy. If you asked a group of staff members what they value most at work now, I would argue that self-esteem factors rank significantly higher now than in pre-pandemic times.

We also don’t have time for friction. Office politics, gossip, inefficient processes, slacking colleagues, stigma, discrimination, unfair practice or antiquated tools and systems fall into the category of聽‘yeah, we know it’s a problem but it’s not that urgent’聽issues that businesses cannot afford to ignore any longer.

For employees, the elusive work-life balance challenge seems to have shifted where people now make time for work and life comes first, within reason. To drive productivity, revenue growth and profitability in 2022, businesses need to prioritise investment of time, energy and funding into the projects that will ensure employees want to work there and projects that remove the likelihood of giving them a reason to look somewhere else.

Customer Value

If you get employee relevance right, customer engagement naturally benefits as your internal culture has a knock-on effect to your customers, suppliers, shareholders and partners. Imagine the difference between a customer support consultant in a call centre who truly appreciates where they work and another who is disgruntled due to poor office culture. Now image the same comparison in a retail store, where your business is still trying to make the sale.

To determine customer value, we need the customer to tell us that the product or service they consume is adding value and to quantify or qualify this to some extent. We don’t get to decide customer value, we can merely perceive expected value. So, to achieve this, it means employees need to do a great enough job to convince a customer to make a purchase – be it online, in-store or through a partner, then we need to have the confidence and means to reach out to that customer in order to ask if the product or service was as expected and useful, and we need to convince them to give us the feedback as honestly and constructively as possible.

Seems achievable right?

Maybe… but the true measure of value delivered will be determined by whether or not they return to buy the same product or service, recommend it to others or buy from the rest of the product catalogue. Lifetime value can be measured once a customer repeats their buying behaviour or expands their range of products bought. You can start to drill down into their recency of purchasing, frequency of purchasing, typical monetary value per purchase, or total purchase value over time. As a business, if you achieve repeat purchase behaviour it means you’re getting something right. Either the customer loves the brand, or they value the quality of products, or they appreciate the way you personalise communication and appear to truly understand them.

In 2022, if businesses begin to put customer lifetime value top of mind, it will force the right line of questioning in every big business decision.聽Do we make those changes to the loyalty app? Do we invest in the track and trace capability, so customers can track their deliveries? Do we switch couriers or suppliers to improve lead times? Do we change the profitability dashboards, so that we know how much customers have spent on our brand? Do we create a single view of customer engagement and history so that our support teams know the status of orders or complaints when a customer calls in?

Progress

Good things come in threes, so a third consideration that lends itself to employee relevance and customer value is to measure progress. It’s no good introducing new processes or tools if you are not tracking the usage and value gained from those new additions. If there is a way to track data for one of these investments, do it and share the insights far and wide so that both staff and project sponsors can see the outcomes in near real-time. Providing some correlation between usage of employees tools and the reduction in sick days or growth in job satisfaction scores, or providing some correlation between customer-facing add-ons and the growth in customer browsing behaviour online or revenue growth, will do wonders to show the real positive impact being achieved through process and system investments.

Generally, when good news is shared in a transparent and authentic manner, it fosters a great working culture that is continuously improving and is willing to share and receive feedback as a means to do so.

There are only 365 days to make an impact this year and some of those have already passed by in the haze that is New Year.聽To make this more tangible, try to commit to identifying one project that will improve employee relevance and one project that will improve customer value by the end of January. Don’t worry about how to deliver the projects just yet… just use the process to begin asking the right questions and getting the buy-in from colleagues and executive management to commit the right level of focus and attention to these two themes this year. Do this, and 2022 will be off to a great start!

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The post The Year of Relevance and Value appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.

While public efforts at hygiene and social distancing have certainly contributed greatly to the decline in daily case numbers, it鈥檚 undoubtedly the tireless work of the healthcare sector that has helped the country get through the greatest public health challenge in a century.

Efforts to treat infected patients were complicated by a prevailing shortage of medical staff. The World Bank estimates South Africa has ,聽Kenya has聽, and聽in . Compare this to the UK, where the rate jumps to 2.8, or Switzerland where the rate is nearly 4.3 doctors per 1000 people.

Africa鈥檚 doctors and nurses often have to work longer hours treating more patients and with fewer resources than their peers in more developed markets. Overworked doctors are more prone to make mistakes, and the long-term effects of working under such conditions .

With pressure on the healthcare sector now easing slightly, it鈥檚 vital that we consider what measures we can take to support the healthcare sector as it prepares for the next wave of COVID-19 infections – or a new, as-yet-unknown health emergency.

To help them prepare for the next major challenge, healthcare providers should design and implement digital transformation initiatives that help them with three key aspects, namely:

One: Understanding operations

The old saying 鈥測ou can鈥檛 manage what you can鈥檛 measure鈥� applies to healthcare too. Modern hospitals, for example, operate more like a business than a public service, with complex operational intricacies that make outdated paper-based processes completely ineffective.

Healthcare organisations should look at investing in new technology tools that allow for greater visibility across all operations and provides real-time insights into the performance of every aspect of the organisation (including the workforce and patients).

The ultimate goal is to create an intelligent healthcare enterprise that blends operational data and experience data (from patients and employees) and leverages new technologies such as AI and advanced analytics to improve decision-making and operational performance.

Using a cloud platform also equips the provider with greater agility – consider for example the impact of COVID-19 on a healthcare organisation that still relies entirely on on-premise technology. Adopting cloud platforms and cloud software is as much about the tools as it is about the mindset 鈥� being open to rapidly adopt new and relevant applications that cater for a specific need will allow organisations to react promptly and appropriately. For the organisation stuck in on-premise thinking, chances are that organisation鈥檚 response to the pandemic was not as effective as their nimbler, cloud-enabled peers.

Two: Understanding patients

While it鈥檚 true that the main purpose of healthcare organisations is to provide care for their patients, many patients today expect more than just care: they want a positive and personalised experience too. In fact, a PwC study found that .

Technology can play a key role here by removing friction in various stages of the customer journey and delivering personalised care at each step. This requires a deep understanding of each patient at an individual level. Healthcare organisations require the ability to collect patient data, identify risks, understand trends and communicate in a transparent and accurate way at scale, while balancing their focus on driving profitability without jeopardising patient experience.

A report on 55 studies . Using an experience management tool, healthcare organisations can develop a deeper understanding of each individual patient鈥檚 experience. This empowers them with insights that can guide the design of personalised interventions at each step and help healthcare providers build a consistently positive overall experience.

Three: Understanding healthcare workers

Considering the shortage of healthcare talent, healthcare providers should prioritise their workforce management efforts to ensure available talent is managed sustainably and with positive patient outcomes in mind.

found that nearly three in every four (74%) healthcare workers would stay with an employer that offered training in new technologies that would help them meet future work demands. Seventy-five percent said the same would be important to them when considering an employer.

Improving the workplace experience for healthcare practitioners should therefore be a top priority for talent attraction and retention. Constant feedback is essential: an IBM study found that , while 81% said they felt positive about their work when they receive regular feedback on their performance.

Employee experience management tools such as Qualtrics can give healthcare organisations a real-time view into the experience of healthcare workers and deliver insights into trends and other factors influencing that experience. Using these insights, healthcare providers can develop appropriate interventions and support measures to ensure workers can focus on the core mandate of improving patient outcomes.

These three aspects all centre around understanding operations, patients and staff. Only once the holistic picture of a healthcare organisation鈥檚 financial and operating stance, its brand affinity and the associated shortfalls are truly understood can leaders of these organisations acknowledge what their starting point is.

Once this has been identified, healthcare organisations can begin to paint a realistic future for their businesses and adopt data-led transformation initiatives that will drive resilience and futureproof them against further health sector emergencies.

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