There is a famous story about the late Prof. Theodore Levitt from Harvard Business School where he says people don't want to buy a ¼ inch drill, they want a ¼ inch hole. 

In business, it is critically important to understand why your customer is buying your product or service. It is very often not for the product or service itself, but for the experience or utility that your specific product or service will deliver them afterwards.

I am reminded of this story because I went to meet with EazyCity recently and expected to learn about how they provide accommodation and language training services to their clients but instead ended up learning about how the staff at EazyCity are passionate about helping people change their lives!!

And of course, it makes perfect sense. Young people don't travel to a new city for the accommodation, or even for the language. They can learn that online from home. They travel to new cities because they are looking to change or improve their lives in some way. The accommodation, the language training, the translation services, even the job finding services, they are all the drills. The life changing experience, now that is the "Hole"!

EazyCity are a tremendous success story on so many fronts. They started in Cork 10 years ago and today they have offices in Cork, Dublin and London and are in the process of moving into the US. Their workforce is young, dynamic, passionate, dedicated and above all flexible. And, as I witnessed first hand when doing a team workshop with them recently, they are happy!

So what is their secret?

Well I think the first thing is that the owners, Julia and Enrico, understand and care about what their customers are looking for. They have traveled to other countries themselves and they understand what is driving the young traveler these days and they are passionate about looking after them and helping them fulfill their dreams. Ask any of the staff and they will tell you they are "welcoming service" and they are there to help their clients in whatever way they can. Julia herself says that the day will never come when a client is left to fend for themselves because of something like a delayed flight. They will always be there to welcome the client into our cities no matter what time of the day or night they end up arriving.

The second part of their secret is the staff they recruit. As Julia puts it, they are looking more for attitude than skills. The important qualities are commitment to the job and flexibility. They work long hours and they are available to their clients 7 days a week. If someone is going to be resentful that they are missing a social engagement because the client they are welcoming has a delayed flight, then they are not the right person for the job.

That may seem like a tall ask – yet they have pulled it off. All of the staff that I interviewed spoke about wanting to do all that they can to help their clients and solve their problems and even referred to the role they were playing in helping improve their clients' lives. The key attitude they say they bring to work with them every day was positivity.

The third part of their secret is the culture of the organisation. This is something that EazyCity's owners, Julia and Enrico, pay a lot of attention to. They have identified their 8 core values, which can be seen displayed in their stairway. 

Thank you Troy, Barbara, Justin, Luca and Julia for sharing your wonderful story with me. Thank you for showing me how seeing beyond the mere product or service you are providing to the great positive impact you can make on people's lives can make a great, dynamic, exciting and fun business.

How about you reader? Have you managed to understand the real driver behind why your customer wants or needs what you are selling? Do your staff understand it? Does your company's culture support it? To learn about how you can get your organisation totally aligned with your customers real needs, drop me line at [email protected]. 

To learn more about EazyCity check out www.eazycity.com

PepsiCo dates back to 1898. It employs about 285,000 worldwide (~550 in Ireland) and is the second largest food and beverage company in the world. PepsiCo Ireland has been consistently ranked in the top tier of the best places to work in Ireland for the past 5 years at the annual Great Place to Work Awards. With a pedigree like that, they have got to be doing something extraordinarily right in relation to their People Factor and I met with Lisa Schembri, their Organisation Capability Director based here in Ireland to find out what.

The first thing that strikes me after talking to Lisa is that there is nothing accidental or random about PepsiCo's successful People Factor. It is carefully researched and thought out and is inextricably linked with their overall business strategy. They recognise that people are a key part of their business strategy so much so that 50% of performance measurement in PepsiCo is focused on achieving what they call "people goals" (see performance measurement criteria below).

When I am working with leaders in organisations there are a few key things that I impress on them that they have to get right. They are…

1. You have got to have a strong purpose and vision for your organisation.  It has got to be attractive and inspiring to your people.
2. You have got to be able to communicate that vision clearly, consistently and regularly
3. You have got to have a clear strategy to allow you achieve that vision. 
4. You have got to consistently measure performance against that strategy. There is no point in stating something is important to the business, such as morale or engagement and then not measure how you are performing against it. 
5. Develop your people and shine a light on the positive behaviours and attitudes that you want to grow and encourage in your business.

PepsiCo model how to do all of this exceptionally well for us. Here's a brief outline of how:

PepsiCo's promise to the world and to its employees is simple and clear, to deliver performance with purpose. This performance refers to delivering business and financial success while the purpose refers to the three strands of

Human sustainability

Environmental sustainability and

Talent sustainability

 If you are an employee of PepsiCo you want them to deliver on this promise and you will want to be part of the story of making it happen.

PepsiCo have crafted very clear messages for both its employees and the external world using a variety of media such as the Internet, intranet, video, posters, spoken word and written word. There is a consistent thread throughout all their communications and the messages are reinforced by being constantly and regularly accessible to people.

Click here to see a great example of how PepsiCO can deliver their message in a  clear, accessible and attractive manner. 

PepsiCo breaks down its strategy into six clear business imperatives and again they communicate these openly and in accessible language. Click here to see how these are communicated online for the benefit of shareholders and the general public.

PepsiCo measure their overall performance as a company against their promise of performance with purpose and publish their results for the world to see here.

Across the globe, each business unit of PepsiCo has aligned to six pre-defined categories of performance that they measure against. They are

As well as measuring their business performance, PepsiCo measure their how engaged their workforce is with a biannual Organisational Health Survey in which they score 11 percentage points above the average. And they measure how their associates or employees rate their managers with a Manager Quality Performance Index.  

Hand in hand with performance measurement comes development and growth. There is no point in measuring someone's performance if you are not going to use that data to help the person and the business grow. PepsiCo have a standard performance management process that is rolled out right across the globe. These processes involve the use of some structured online tools but critical to the processes are a series of development conversations between managers and employees and the identification and execution of key development actions.

The model of career development within in PepsiCo is one of "pull" rather than "push". The staff member is invited to identify where they would like to develop their career themselves and after some sense checking is done (a desire to move from the laboratory to head of Finance in 2 years might need some re-thought!) a plan of action and measurement is put in place which is revisited several times throughout the year. 

The result of all of this is that as a leader or employee in PepsiCo you can have a sense of purpose about your work and a sense of clarity in how you are performing and developing. This leads to motivation, engagement and increased productivity. It ultimately leads to success for the organisation.

Does your organisation deliver performance with purpose? Do your people know what that performance or purpose is? Is your strategy clear to everyone in your business or is it just inside your own head? To learn more about how you might deliver performance with purpose in your business contact Miriam at mailto:[email protected]

A heartfelt thanks to Lisa Schembri for sharing with me how the PepsiCo's People Factor works in practice.

I think something special happens when we let our businesses express what we believe in, what we are passionate about. I believe that is what we saw with Fred and Ger Karlsson in DoneDeal and it is what I saw when I met Attila and Levi from Mamukko recently in Kinsale.

Mamukko consists of two Hungarian brothers that make cool and trendy bags from upcycled sails and bicycle tyre tubing amongst other things. When you meet them, their genuine, warm personalities are disarming and their passion for what they are about is infectious.

When I ask Attila and Levi to describe what they do, they say they are simply doing what comes naturally to them. And if I were to sum up what comes naturally to them it would look something like this:
Master craftsmanship – Attila and Levi come from a family of master craftsmen – both mother and father are master leather workers as well as their parents before them. Their parents came to Ireland to teach them the skill of production and template making.

Art and creativity – Levi has studied art in various forms for 12 years and his natural eye for form and colour shines through in all their work.

Conscious living – Both Attila and Levi are passionate about the upcycling aspect of their work. They are not just latching onto an up and coming trend to sell their work. The upcycling ethos is present in every part of it. For example, they use old Lidl posters to cut out the reusable templates for their bags when they are designing them.  They are both DJs and love listening to music while they work. And of course, their music of choice they tell me is conscious music such as raggae, African beats and hip-hop.

Bring all the above together with Attila's natural instinct and appetite for Smart Business Development and you have a recipe for a business that speaks volumes about values, quality and creativity.

Three years ago, both Attila and Levi were unemployed. Now, they are finding it hard to keep up with the demand for their product. They have been shortlisted for the 2013 Green Start Up Award in the Green Startup of the Year category, they need to find a bigger premises and they are looking at taking on an employee.

The positive psychology movement tells us that if we are given the opportunity to use our strengths in our work (and note, in this case, our strengths are not what we are good at but rather what energises us, what we can enjoy and lose ourselves in) we will not only be happier but far more successful.

In my years of working with teams in the workplace I have seen this in evidence all the time. When a team was able to allow its individual members play to their strengths in the service of doing the job on hand, the success rate of the whole team grew. But not just that, when the team members believed in the purpose of their mission, they were happy to give that extra effort that pushed success rates up to the exceptional level. Some industry experts claim that extra effort, or discretionary effort as it is sometimes called, can give a business up to 40% more productivity!

Attila and Levi are prime examples of this. The goals that energise and motivate them are to take the craftsmanship of their parents and make it contemporary and to be part of pioneering the upcycling movement in Ireland. They couple their passion with their respective strengths and everything else is naturally flowing from there.

  When you speak with them, they are open, generous and very happy to share any knowledge they have with you. They are full of creative ideas. The only challenge for them is to find the time to act on them as they are currently working so hard to meet demand for their upcycled bags.

Everything about them just seems so "natural" to use their own words, and so right. They deserve all the success that their business will bring them because they are showing the rest of us that it is possible to marry our values with our work and find a way to make it all work for the better of the world.

Thank you Attila and Levi for letting me into your world and for reminding me that it is possible to express my own values and passions through my own work and still be successful.

Are you or your people able to express their passions, values and strengths in your organisation? To explore how you might introduce more of this into your organisation contact Miriam at [email protected].

Check out more about Mamukko here.

One could argue that organisations are just a whole series of conversations. Some conversations take the shape of meetings where critical decisions are made or ways forward negotiated, others are social conversations, held over tea breaks or at the water cooler.

Many respected thinkers and writers on the topic of organisational change such as Peter Senge and Margaret J. Wheatley write about bringing about positive change through the power of conversation (ref: The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Corld Cafe Community, Margaret J. Wheatley, Peter Senge).

If you really want to learn what an organisation is about, what it's values are, what type of place it is to work in, wander around for a while and listen to the conversations that are taking place, on the production floor, in the board rooms, at the water coolers. If you want to bring about some positive change in an organisation, a good place to start, and some might say the only place to start, is with those conversations.

In my personal experience of working with organisations and teams to develop cultures of innovation, high performance and success, the one thing that allows individuals and teams to engage fully in their work is the feeling that what they think and do matters. And one of the simplest, most powerful ways to give them that feeling is to listen to them and to make sure that they feel heard.

So, if you want to start having some powerful, positive conversations in your organisation today, the number one most important thing you can do is start listening and ensure that everyone else starts listening too. And be careful, this type of listening is not shutting your mouth long enough to let the other person finish speaking. It is listening with the intention of truly understanding (as Stephen Covey says in his 7 Habits). It is listening hard enough to ensure that the other person is heard and feels heard. Then you will find them able to listen to you and to engage with their whole heart and mind.

What are your thoughts of the most important aspects of a powerful conversation? Have you used the power of conversation to bring about change in your workplace?

To learn more about how you can change the conversations in your workplace contact Miriam at mailto:[email protected]

A few years ago, the owners of DoneDeal set themselves a target of becoming Ireland's largest classified website by far. Today, they have not only achieved that target but as I learned from a recent visit to their offices in Wexford, they have also got to be one of Ireland's coolest and best places to work!

I am curious to learn about the "people factor" in successful companies in Ireland and having heard Fred Karlsson (co-founder of DoneDeal) speak at an event in Cork, I reckoned that there was something very special happening in DoneDeal. And believe me, I was not wrong.

The first thing that struck me when I contacted DoneDeal was the positive response that came immediately from Emer, their Office/HR and Culture Manager at DoneDeal. Very few organisations that I know of have a "culture manager" – so already this was telling me something was different about this place.

My work with organisations very often involves shining a light on their existing culture and examining the effect it may be having on their success. Here at DoneDeal, everyone is very clear that their culture is one of the most important contributing factors to their success.

At the heart of the DoneDeal culture is a deep care and respect for people. Everyone I spoke to had their own individual stories of how they felt important, listened to, cared about and trusted in DoneDeal. Words like "family" were used frequently to describe the growing team of 24 staff. As a result, every single one of them was passionate (and I am not using that word lightly here) about contributing to and maintaining the success of the DoneDeal business. DoneDeal's success was their success.

One of the little differences that demonstrate the culture in action in DoneDeal is the "compulsory tea break" at 10:30am – where everyone gets to sit and chat together in the kitchen. Very few excuses are accepted for missing this tea break!

This culture of care and respect is extended out to the DoneDeal customers. The staff really care about the customer's experience and believe that everybody should be heard – meaning that exceptional customer support is what is expected all of the time. This poster from their office sums up nicely how their culture infuses everything they do.

One thing I have learnt from my years of experience is that success starts with hiring the right people and that is one thing that comes across very strongly in DoneDeal; from the very beginning, great care and attention was paid to selecting and hiring their staff. They look for much more than technical ability. They look for people that will fit in well with the team, that will enjoy and enhance the culture of the place and that will bring the right attitude to their work.

Fred Karlsson and his wife, Geraldine, started DoneDeal in 2005. They took on Donna, their first employee in 2009. At that time, Donna was a single mother, working to put herself through college by cleaning houses. She was cleaning Fred and Geraldine's house and it was her desire to always want to do better and her attention to detail like folding in the corners of the toilet paper that impressed Fred and Geraldine so much. They decided this is the type of person they wanted looking after their customers. Donna has gone on to become DoneDeal's social media guru – a critically important role in a business like DoneDeal's.

One thing that became obvious to me in my work is that people development is about so much more than just sending people on training courses. 70% of what we learn is picked up on the job so it is critical to create an atmosphere that is conducive to questioning and learning.
Because of the open, relaxed and encouraging culture that exists in DoneDeal, people feel safe to ask questions and to put forward ideas, no matter what their role is. They are given every support they need to develop and learn. As the business has grown, individuals have grown with it. A classic example of this is Melrona, who looks after customer support. It is obvious from listening to her that she infuses that role with passion and pride. One of Melrona's proudest moments is giving a talk last year on fraud to criminal intelligence officers at the Garda Training College in Templemore. This September she is travelling to America to give a presentation at a fraud summit. Ask her what her qualifications are for doing this and she'll say "none, people are my qualifications"! But four years ago, Melrona could never have seen herself delivering talks to criminal intelligence officers. She credits her development to the belief that Fred and Ger had in her. As she said herself, because she feels they are interested in her as a person, she performs better.  

Over the years I have spent many long days working with leadership teams to help them craft a compelling vision for their organisation. That is why I loved the simplicity of Fred's take on a great vision.  According to him, a great vision has to do two things:

1.     It has to energise you

2.     It has to give you focus

Fred and Geraldine started out with the vision to make DoneDeal the biggest classified website in Ireland. And what did that mean? It meant having the most customers posting up the most ads of all the websites in Ireland. They put this up on the wall of their office and it motivated them every time they read it. But here is how it focused them…

Fred is a techie at heart and was full of ideas about how to bring all sorts of flash technology and cool features into their website. But, the chances were that many of their customers would not be able to use these features on their PCs. So would these flash features bring them more customers and closer to their vision? Probably not.

So, to keep them focused on achieving their vision, DoneDeal have introduced the "mother-in-law test", which is quite simply "could my mother-in-law use this?". This has contributed to DoneDeal's website being extremely accessible and easy to use for everyone.

As any business person will tell you, it is having effective, efficient processes is where the rubber hits the road when building success. DoneDeal have many, but two stand out that are worth mentioning here.

The first is that every staff member gets to have a "job chat" with their manager every six months where they talk about their progress, their goals and the support they need for further development. Each staff member has KPIs and what was refreshing was that the KPIs were ones that made perfect sense to them. They could see how they contributed to the success of DoneDeal and could buy into them completely.

The second is the process used for developing new features on the website (the bread and butter of DoneDeal's success and growth). For this they use an agile development process called the Scrum Methodology. There is plenty of information available on the internet for anyone interested in checking out more about this.

Without a doubt, a huge source of pride and motivation in DoneDeal is the fact that every two months they give 10% of their turnover to charity! And every staff member gets a chance to pick a charity to be the beneficiary of this very generous donation. In March 2013, €34, 466.70 was raised and donated to Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin. You can check out their website to see the list of charities that have been helped by DoneDeal to the tuned of about €500,000 to date!

Meeting with the staff at DoneDeal has opened my eyes and has confirmed my belief that great people and great people practices can lead to outstanding, sustainable success. My heartfelt thanks goes to Emer, Donna, Renata, Melrona, Philip, Peter, Cathal and Fred for so generously sharing their thoughts and their experiences with me.

Have you any thoughts and experiences to share on the People Factor in your organisation? 

What could Pepsico Ireland , DoneDeal and Mamukko  (a new, up and coming upcycling business based in Kinsale) possibly all have in common?

The first answer is they are all exciting companies that are experiencing success, albeit at vary different stages.

The second answer is very simple, and it is what all businesses have in common, people. But it is a bit more than that; they pay particular attention to the "people factor" of their business. They are conscious of the pivotal role that people play in their business success and rather than take it for granted, they give time, care and attention to how they manage their respective "people factors".

Your people factor could refer to the culture of your organisation, your recruitment practices, your employee engagement practices, your change management practices and not least, your leadership.

My work is all about helping organisations get their people factor right. For years now I have helped leaders deal with people crises, engage positively with change and build successful engaged workforces. It is a subject I am passionate about. I believe getting your people factor right is critical for success for numerous reasons.  It is what is going to deliver you innovation, creativity, flexibility, loyalty, accountability and responsibility. It's a no brainer really!

But I recognise that there is no one way to get your people factor right. It is different for every organisation depending on size, environment, history, context, leadership and industry sector.

There are many organisations in Ireland already getting the people factor right in their own unique way. I think we can all learn from them. I am not suggesting that we try to imitate any of them but we can take inspiration from them. We can take ideas to apply to our own particular situations and we can grow our own unique, successful people factors.

Over the next number of months, I intend to seek out and interview organisations where it is obvious that there is something special happening with the people, where you can see that they are making a huge contribution to the organisation's success and where that contribution is recognised and acknowledged. I am going to share the stories of what I learn here with you.

I fully expect to be inspired by and to learn from these organisations. And if you are a leader, owner, manager, HR professional or any interested party, my sincere hope is that you will join me on this journey of learning and that you too will find inspiration and practical guidance for your own organisation.

If you have an interesting people factor story you want to share with me, don't be afraid to contact me, either through the comments below, or at [email protected].