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In evaluating the performance of your organization, three critical indicators can provide invaluable insight: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow. As Jack Welch famously stated, these factors reveal almost everything you need to know.
Now, picture having continuous and meaningful feedback from the most frequent users of your technology products, leading to enhanced profitability. Would you overlook such an opportunity? Surprisingly, many organizations do. I’m referring not to your purchasing customers but to your employees who utilize your technology at airports, hotels, restaurants, and similar venues. The well-known adage attributed to Henry Ford—”If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”—may hold some truth, but the reality is that both your internal and external customers often have valuable insights about what needs improvement in your offerings. While groundbreaking innovations may emerge from labs or brilliant minds, these instances are rare and unpredictable. The charm of incremental innovations is that they seamlessly integrate into agile organizations, allowing teams to quickly iterate, test, and scale effective ideas while swiftly abandoning unsuccessful ones. Too often, we become insular in our search for these ideas, deterred by the complexity of engaging large groups of employees or, regrettably, overly confident in believing that concepts from the corporate ivory tower are the best. Your airline staff, drive-thru operators, or front desk personnel would beg to differ.
How does this apply to the travel and hospitality industry?
Consider a hypothetical case study highlighting common pitfalls: Acme Inc. decides to implement a new Point-of-Sale system to replace their outdated solution, enticing management with the promise of an AI-driven loyalty program. Unfortunately, the outcome is familiar to many organizations. The new system fails to align with their unique operational processes. Resistance to change existing practices, which vary across different brands, leads to a significant backlog of change requests, causing delays in deployment. After the system goes live, numerous challenges arise. The flashy features that initially excited management are overshadowed by the many small functional elements that employees relied upon, unbeknownst to the developers. Consequently, adoption falters, business operations suffer, and enthusiasm for future investments wanes.
Does this scenario resonate with you? Employee engagement in technology is frequently overlooked, and it’s one of the primary reasons new initiatives falter. Observing how frontline staff navigate technology has often humbled and inspired me—witnessing their creative workarounds to adapt systems that seemed flawless in the boardroom but faltered in practice. So, how can you ensure that your internal technology users, whether in restaurants, hotels, or airports, feel involved in shaping technology that meets their needs? Here are some strategies that have proven effective for me.
Recognize Employees as Customers
In organizations with younger frontline employees, it’s crucial to understand their technology habits outside the workplace. Just thirty years ago, technologies like PCs and email were primarily found in professional settings. However, the landscape has dramatically shifted. Consumers have taken the lead in adopting new technologies—social media, smartphones, and gaming platforms—raising expectations for businesses to keep pace. Many employees raised on text messaging now communicate through platforms like TikTok and Snapchat, indicating a significant evolution in expectations over a single generation. While the roles have reversed, many companies still mistakenly believe they understand their customers better than they do. When it comes to mobile technology, how many employees can confidently say their enterprise mobile experience matches their personal one? To paraphrase an old saying: the consumer isn’t a fool; she’s your employee.
Implement Build-Test-Repeat
At Amazon, we are passionate about agile methodologies because they reflect essential truths regarding software development. Often, our business requirements stem from assumptions about what end-users want in the next major release. By delivering smaller increments of functionality to the same users faster, and treating these requirements as hypotheses, we can pivot based on actual data regarding how features are utilized or received.
Testing can be straightforward. For instance, I’ve utilized interactive wireframes to observe how an employee processes a complex order. This method is typically low-cost and yields immediate feedback, both visually and through discussions with employees. Qantas effectively demonstrated this approach with an in-flight application developed with AWS. As confidence in the direction grows, involve employees in sprint reviews for additional feedback, rotating participants regularly to mitigate groupthink. This not only fosters a diverse range of insights but also cultivates champions for the product. When developing global systems, I’ve encountered variations impacting design, from average employee heights to color perception and hand sizes.
Leverage Data for Insights
I have been fortunate to work at a company that invested in tools like video ethnography to comprehend how systems were utilized. While analysis can be labor-intensive, advancements in technologies such as Amazon Rekognition open up future possibilities for automating this process. Instrument your functionality during development.
Taking the POS example once more, metrics of interest might include usage frequency of new features, system reliability, latency, and responsiveness. You might be surprised by the data revealing how seldom certain “must-have” functionalities are utilized. This often occurs when a vocal individual in the organization insists on an enhancement based on their perception of its importance. Empowering product managers is critical in this context, holding them accountable for prioritizing functionalities and measuring the effectiveness of their choices. If the loudest voices prevail, they should be responsible for demonstrating through data that their requests are warranted and, post-implementation, that these features are being used effectively.
Heed Anecdotes
As Jeff Bezos wisely noted, when anecdotes and data conflict, the anecdotes often hold the truth. It is essential not to rely solely on technology; walk in your employees’ shoes. Spending an hour in their roles offers invaluable insights, particularly regarding what matters most to them. When facing a lengthy drive-thru or check-in queue, the speed and reliability of the system far outweigh the importance of a flashy feature.
The data generated from systems must be contextualized and should not be followed blindly. By engaging in frontline work, conducting surveys, or forming employee focus groups, you’re likely to gather meaningful anecdotes. Our initial reaction is often to dismiss these stories if they can’t be replicated in a controlled setting. Instead, we should collect these narratives and thoroughly investigate them. For further insights into enhancing employee engagement, you might explore this excellent resource on Amazon’s onboarding process. Additionally, HR professionals could find valuable information in this article on HRAs and health insurance. If you’re interested in crafting effective letters of interest, consider checking out this informative blog post.
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