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WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE AN ISO 14001 LEAD AUDITOR?
SIGN UP NOW FOR OUR AMAZING VALUE COURSE This is a top quality residential course based near Milton Keynes. Full details were provided in our February Newsletter, but if you missed it, follow this link to our website for more information. Click here to access our booking form, which includes instructions on how to book, payment methods accepted and terms and conditions of boking. Bookings will be consideredto be on a provisional basis only until full payment has been received. |
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Think about it!!
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| What am I?
I am the start of eternity,
The end of time and space,
The beginning of every end
And the end of every race.
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| Did you know? |
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The current average price for unleaded petrol is around £1.40 per litre, which you may think is expensive enough, but did you know that this is a mere snip compared to the price per litre of some frequently purchased liquids? Try these prices per litre, all calculated from package prices found in well known supermarkets and high street suppliers -
Fairy Liquid - £2.29
Vanish Power Gel - £4.30
Calpol - £27.30
Vicks Cough Syrup - £28.08
Quink ink - £65.79
Tipp-Ex - £74.50
- and how about this?
The average price for a non recycled printer cartridge containing 38ml of ink is about £25 - that's £658 per litre!!!!!
No wonder printers are so cheap. Once bought, someone carries on taking money for all those ink cartridges that have to be replaced at frequent intervals.
So, if you think today's petrol prices are astronomical, be glad your car doesn't run on household cleaning products, cough and cold medicine or office stationery products and especially, perish the thought, printer ink!
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| Featured Tool | |
Employee Opinion Surveys
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Employee opinion surveys are an important and popular tool used to solicit employee feedback. They can be morale-boosting for those who may not have many other opportunities to confidentially express their views and can improve levels of productivity and commitment by identifying the root causes of workplace attitudes and employee dissatisfaction, which can then be targeted for improvement,
allowing you to boost organizational productivity.
To make sure employees are open and honest, they must be assured that their opinions are kept confidential. This can best be achieved by getting a third party to conduct the survey. There are many commercial suppliers who offer this service, but for small organizations costs can be minimized by asking a sister company, other department or benchmarking partner to do it for you on a tit for tat basis - they do yours and you do theirs.
The important thing is that your employees should be involved in designing as well as answering the questions, to make sure you are asking them about the things that are most important in determining their satisfaction levels - you may think you know what these are but the truth could surprise you - see our article about Elton Mayo to the right and how his research into the factors affecting employee productivity thwarted the preconceived ideas of the day.
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Expert Interview
Are there some aspects of your organization that you would like to improve, but you are not exactly sure how you need to go about doing this? Or do you need to introduce nationally and/ or internationally recognized standards in some parts of your organization - e.g. people management, environmental standards, health and safety - and you are not sure which standard is most appropriate?
Perhaps you would like some expert help and advice to identify what exactly it is that you need?
Our Expert Interview tool is designed to give you just that.
By following this link and answering a few very simple questions, our Expert Interview will guide you to the right solution.
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Online Excellence Calculator
Would you like to see how your organization might perform if assessed against the EFQM Excellence Model?
There are many types of self-assessment available to organizations wishing to benefit from this widely used excellence framework.
Experience just one of them by following this link and completing a ten minute, matrix based, assessment of the level of excellence of your organization.
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Think about it!!
Answer
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The letter "e"
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| Newsletter Archive | | To view our previous newsletters in our archive please click the link above |
| If you found this issue interesting and believe a friend or colleague would find the articles useful please click on the button above to send it to them.
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Greetings!
We are very pleased to announce that next month we are supporting one of our clients in the rail industry at a major international exhibition, Railtex 2011, to see how we can enhance their offer to potential new customers and facilitate them in entering new markets. We are proud of our experience in the rail sector, where there is real potential in countries with strong emerging economies currently lacking the transport and communication infrastructure to support those economies effectively. More details of the exhibition are given below.
Have you ever been to a meeting - whether it was to present a proposal to a customer, ask your boss for a pay rise, discuss a problem with your child's school or deal with a deputation of aggrieved employees - and felt like you were on the back foot from the moment the meeting kicked off? If so, read below for top tips from Gavin Davis, a director of Pelham Bell Pottinger, on how to control the agenda in a meeting and get your own way.
Did you know that, according to various research projects that have been conducted by the Harvard Business School over the past 30 years, the biggest difference between the most profitable and least profitable companies in the same industry is how successful they are at keeping their existing customers, not how successful they are at winning new ones? See our article below that explains not only why this is, but also how you can make the most of your existing customers.
Also this month. we have the ninth in our Quality Guru series, Elton Mayo, who was one of the very first people to take a serious interest in factors influencing employee productivity other than working environment and financial reward. He discovered that social factors, such as relationships within groups of employees, were often more important than pay and conditions in influencing employee performance.
Finally, I am happy to tell those of you that are interested in environmental issues that we still have a few places left on our excellent ISO 14001 Lead Auditor course. See the the box to the left for more details on how to book.
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Railtex 2011
Railtex is an annual international business to business exhibition focused on the rail industry, exhibiting a wide range of railway equipment, systems and services and taking place at Earl's Court in London from the 14th to the 16th June. All key suppliers to the rail industry will be there and we are very happy to be on a stand alongside one of our most valued customers, Bakerail Services Ltd., who offer specialist and dedicated support in the field of Railway Infrastructure Systems Engineering. We will be on stand J32 alongside Bakerail Services in order to enhance the offer they can make to potential new clients and in potential new markets, such as the Gulf States. We can give Bakerail Services the confidence that, with our support, their management systems, quality standards and processes will be able to meet customer needs and expectations.
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How to control the agenda in a meeting
1. Get there early
Don't leave until the last minute tasks like preparing your presentation, printing off documents or planning the journey. If you are early, you have time to collect your thoughts and be ready. Getting there late puts you at a disadvantage before you even start.
2. Find some common ground
Try to break down barriers e.g. by chatting about sport, a film, a holiday or even the weather. If the meeting is a formal affair, try and have an informal gathering first, perhaps in an outer office or coffee room, to discuss objectives and make a connection "and see the colour of each other's eyes".
3. Get in early on the discussion
This shows you are engaged and will encourage people to direct conversation to you. If you leave it too late to get in on the discussion, everyone will expect something ground breaking when you do choose to come in
4. Think about seating arrangements
If you are trying to win new business, make it friendly, relatively informal and relaxed. They should feel you are there to help and advise them. But if you are in negotiations, you need to draw battle lines and face them from the other side/end of the table - you need to take a position..
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Make the most of your existing customers
It costs 5 to 20 times more to win a new customer than to keep an existing one and customer value increases over time, so the longer you keep a customer the more profitable they become. Selling to existing customers involves lower costs - you need less time to find the right contact, explain things, set up purchasing arrangements and do credit checks.
What's more, your existing customers are less price-sensitive. In times of economic instability, rather than cut costs by finding a cheaper alternative, customers often become risk averse - deciding to stick with critical suppliers rather than jeopardize delivery for a small price advantage.
Turnover and profit can also increase over time because of referrals. Customers who have had good experiences with your company start to trust you and recommend you to others and research shows that the best customers are the ones you get through referrals.
Tips for maximising profit from your existing customers
- Provide excellent customer service - compare your service and product with that of your competitors in terms of quality, ease of ordering and delivery. Even if you can shave just seconds off an order's delivery time, or add in one more value-added bonus or experience - it could well be worth it to retain a warm customer.
- Listen to customers - get frequent and objective feedback from a representative sample of your customer base and act upon it to improve your systems and processes. Always respond immediately to complaints and let customers know what action you have taken.
- Keep in touch - just because a customer doesn't take the initiative in coming back to you, it doesn't mean they don't want to do more business with you. People may need to be reminded that you still exist and are interested in working with them. A simple, "Hi! How are you?" type email, or sending a link with a "Saw this and thought of you..." can be enough to rekindle interest or stimulate contact.
- Cross sell - always be on the look-out for opportunities to sell other services or products to existing customers and make sure you keep them informed of anything new you are developing.
- Ask for referrals - if a customer has been happy doing business with you, don't be shy in asking them to recommend you to others.
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Quality Guru Series
Although Elton Mayo's most notable achievements were in the field of industrial and political psychology, rather than those of manufacturing quality and customer first ideology, nevertheless he can be said to be a true guru of Total Quality and Business Excellence principles, since
his work was ground-breaking in establishing the fact that employee satisfaction and motivation is dependent on a complex set of issues, many of which are not at all related to financial remuneration or understood by employers. His work clearly sits in the People and People Results areas of the EFQM Excellence Model, a holistic model, covering all of an organization's activity and results and based on the principle that in order to achieve true excellence as a whole, you need to ensure excellence in all areas of your organization, with the well-being and satisfaction of your people being key to this.
Born in Adelaide, South Australia in1880, the son of a civil engineer, Elton Mayo, fairly early in his career, was appointed as a foundation lecturer in philosophy and education at the then newly established university in Queensland. Becoming an expert on industrial and political psychology, he served on government bodies during the First World War, advising on the organization of work for the war effort and was made a professor of philosophy after the war. He became an outstanding lecturer, regularly speaking at Worker's Education Association classes and tutorials, addressing unions and professional bodies.
Travelling to San Francisco in 1922, he quickly attracted the attention of industrialists and industrial psychologists for his thoughts on the psychological causes of industrial unrest and in 1923 was given a temporary post at the University of Pennsylvania and provided with an income for six months by the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller. There he researched the value of rest pauses on worker productivity in various textile firms, proving that regular pauses from back-breaking work increase productivity. Within two years he was offered and accepted a research professorship in the Harvard Business School, with enormous support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
In March 1928 Mayo concluded, whilst doing some research for the Western Electric Company, that attitude to work seemed to affect the behaviour of the employees. This led to a large-scale interviewing programme to establish what the workers felt and thought about their work and by 1929 Mayo had developed rules for interviewing that became the basis of his clinical technique for data collection. He advocated using this technique to discover what employees thought about their work and their workplace. The data could then be used both as the basis of his scientific theories about industrial psychology and also as the basis for making changes leading to greater productivity. This was, in effect, a very early form of employee opinion survey (see our Featured Tool article to the left).
His guidance was simple and remains influential today:
- give your full attention to the interviewee, and make it evident that you are doing so
- listen and do not talk
- never argue or give advice
- listen for what the interviewee wants to say, does not want to say, and cannot say without help
- as you listen plot tentatively, and for subsequent correction, the pattern of experience that is being presented before you
- to test your grasp of the pattern summarize cautiously and clearly what has been said without twisting it
- treat what has been said in confidence
The research he conducted in the 1930s, at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois, near Chicago (known as "The Hawthorne Studies"), showed the importance of groups in affecting the behaviour of individuals at work. He carried out a number of investigations to look at ways of improving productivity, for example changing lighting conditions in the workplace. What he found, however, was that work satisfaction depended to a large extent on the informal social pattern of the work group. Where norms of co-operation and output were established within the group, then physical conditions or financial incentives had little motivational value. He concluded that people have a tendency to form work groups and this can be used by management to benefit the organization.
From his research, he concluded the following:
- individual workers cannot be treated in isolation, but must be seen as members of a group
- monetary incentives and good working conditions are less important to the individual than the need to belong to a group
- informal or unofficial groups formed at work have a strong influence on the behaviour of those workers in a group
- managers must be aware of these 'social needs' and cater for them to ensure that employees collaborate with the organization rather than work against it
On annual journeys to Europe during the 1930s, Mayo took every opportunity at university meetings, academic conferences and gatherings with colleagues to outline and discuss this work. The research was published in 1939 in the book Management and the Worker. Before his death in 1949 Mayo wrote on many topics, but he is best known for what came to be considered ground-breaking research in American industrial sociology and applied social psychology. |
ley hill solutions aims to be one of Europe's most innovative consultancy organisations specialising in the tools and methods to improve the way your business works and performs. We use internationally recognised standards and frameworks such as ISO9001 and the EFQM Excellence Model to develop solutions that are right for your business.
Please contact us at ley hill solutions if we can be of any assistance.
Sincerely,
Graham Hull
ley hill solutions limited |
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The information provided in this newsletter and on our website is as correct and up to date as we can make it. no warranty, express or implied, is given regarding its accuracy. We do not accept any liability for errors or omissions. We shall not be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damage for loss of business or loss of profits) arising from the use of, or inability to use, this site or any information contained it it, or from any action or decision taken as a result of using this site, or any such information.
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