On Purpose

by Shaun Smith

  Measure

  One of the key success factors is ensuring that the organization ‘stands firm’ and the efforts are sustained through measuring and rewarding the right things. If you say that customer experience is important but only measure sales, people will soon default to selling rather than service. Aligning measures and rewards starts at the top of the organization, as Simon Jones points out:

  ‘We are a very collaborative team whose interests are aligned. What I mean by that is we have a common incentive platform that goes all the way down to the site level, so there are no corporate politics where I’m incentivized to do something that may cause one of my colleagues to fail. Actually, if one of my colleagues fails, I fail. We miss our metrics. And what that means is we have a very supportive, very collaborative culture, and that percolates its way throughout the entire organization. I’ve worked in very complex, global businesses, which have matrix organizations, and in a lot of those organizations the incentives simply aren’t aligned. Therefore, you get an internal rat race, which leads to all sorts of adverse behaviours. We just don’t have that.’

  One of the things we usually devise with our clients is a ‘scorecard’ that aligns key customer experience metrics with financial, business, operational and people measures. In the case of Premier Inn they already used the parent company Whitbread’s WIN Card system. This stands for ‘Whitbread In Numbers’ and brings together all of the key business measures. We used this as the basis and simply identified which metrics were going to be the most appropriate to evaluate success. These were agreed as customer advocacy in the form of NPS, employee engagement and invocations (being the amount of money refunded as a result of the ‘Good Night Guarantee’ being triggered):

  ‘Our promise is important, because the very existence of the guarantee gives our team confidence in our product, because they know ultimately they can stand behind that guarantee when the front line is dealing with guest complaints. The second thing is, we have thought about how we hard wire into the system the delivery of our purpose and our brand promise, through things like our scorecard, which we call our WIN Card, our incentives programme, and our forensic approach to how we audit the sites, and then linking the audit and WIN card to staff incentives. So everyone is lined up behind a very transparent set of metrics that have been developed with the consumer in mind, and then we make sure that day-in-day-out we’re delivering that purpose and the promise.’

  John Forrest makes the important point that a scorecard of this kind ensures that the purpose and promise become the focus of the organization for the year, not just the annual conference. So what are the results?

  ‘Our financial results are great. This year we achieved the highest guest recommend score that we’ve ever had. Our net promoter score is 59.8, an all-time high. But I think it’s really the softer things, about how it makes the team member feel. Does it give them a reason to come to work? Do they get behind our purpose? I measure our success by some of the little things: I get an e-mail from a team member that says “I’ve just been on Bigger, Bolder, Better Module Two and it’s really inspired me. I’m really looking forward to going back to work to put it into practice.” I’m out with John in the business the next couple of days and one of the things I want to do is talk to some team members about how they found the programme. Do they really say, the reason I come to work is to “Make our guests feel brilliant, through a great night’s sleep”? Even though our team engagement score is nearly 80 per cent, I think this will increase it. I think it will give people a reason to come to work, and that’s what I’m looking for.’

  Employee engagement did, in fact, increase. The Hay Group independently measured the employee engagement in 2014 and found that employee understanding and support for the brand purpose were 96 per cent – some 22 points higher than the UK norm and 16 points higher than their top performance benchmark. In 2015, Premier Inn won the Marketing Society award for Employee Engagement. See ow.ly/Q05vk. We know from our research that there is a relationship between employee engagement, employee retention, customer experience and customer retention. This has proven to be the case. Premier Inn has seen a significant increase in team member engagement, a reduction in team member turnover, a 26 per cent reduction in ‘invocations’ – those occasions when the ‘Good Night Guarantee’ is triggered, and a sharp increase in guest recommendation:

  ‘Our turnover has decreased, so we are now at the lowest we’ve been for a number of years. I think what our purpose has made us do, though, is to focus on what is really important and we have identified that our housekeeping teams are very important. I’m not really sure we gave them as much emphasis as we should have in the past. So we’ve made some bold decisions about not outsourcing housekeeping in the future.

  ‘We previously looked at it from a commercial perspective, not from a guest or a people perspective. So what the purpose has done for me as an HR director is to help me put people at the top of the agenda in every level. I’m able to have much more influence to help me get the decisions that I want.’

  As every HR director will tell you, being able to influence the executive agenda is a key success factor. Another is sustaining success – and that is where innovation becomes important, not just in the product or technological sense, but in every aspect of the business to ensure that the organization ‘stands firm’. We think of innovation as being continually reinventing the business to ensure that results continue to improve. As was said in Chapter 11, ‘If you want to stay number one, think like number two.’

  Innovate

  Amanda Brady says:

  ‘The next step is to think about sustainability. How do we take it to the next level but keep the core principles in place (because they’re not going to change)? I think we need to keep refreshing and evolving the campaign so that people feel like they are getting something new but keep the core messages the same. For me, that is a challenge. I do think there is a moment in time now about what comes next. We need to keep up the momentum.

  ‘As I look towards the future I can see that the digital world is expanding and changing how we communicate. How do you keep up to date with that? I think that challenges a lot of the old principles of HR. For example, although HR has a functional responsibility, we play a bigger part in touching and cutting across all of the disciplines within a business and you have to be equipped to be able to do that. The way we recruit will be very different in the future. The way that we develop people will be very different. We have a social responsibility but we also have an economic and business responsibility – and how we balance those two things together will be quite a challenge. We have a much more competitive landscape ahead of us, and what might have been good when we were in a recession won’t keep us equipped for the future. I think this campaign will help us but I do think we need to keep thinking about how we refresh and evolve it and make sure everything that we do aligns with it so that we are delivering one common message.’

  Patrick Dempsey is also concerned with sustainability:

  ‘We’ve got to make sure that everybody new coming in goes through the same programme, because otherwise, in two or three years’ time, 40 per cent or 50 per cent of the organization will be new. We’ve got to continue to talk about “Bigger, Bolder, Better”. So it will continue to be the theme of our conference this year. We need to continue “Premier Inn – a place made by you”. That’s how we keep the culture alive. That’s the big thing for me, about how we sustain it. (See the video at ow.ly/Q070.)

  ‘There is also something in my mind about how to engage our team members with our social initiatives. Over the next two to three years we will offer 1,500 apprenticeships, put 7,000 people into learning; we will have around 2,000 people on work experiences over that period of time, and we will have recruited 3,000–4,000 new people into roles, from the NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) population. I wonder how we can weave that into “Premier Inn – a place made by
you” so that it’s not just about the fabric of the building, it’s about the teams and the family you interact with. I would love to create 100,000 opportunities for 16–24-year-olds, school placements and apprenticeships, over the course of my lifetime. I think you can have a personal purpose and a work purpose and for me the two are very linked.’

  Patrick Dempsey raises another very important point, and that is the issue of purpose at the level of the individual. When organizational purpose and personal purpose intersect you get a very powerful force for change for good. If brands are to be more than money-making machines for shareholders they have to create value for customers and the society within which they exist. And that is the fundamental premise of this book; we believe that organizations must have a purpose that serves society at large and their customers in particular if they are to survive. Customers want to do business with brands that have authenticity – and people want to work with brands that are values-led. But if you get those two things right the profits will follow anyway.

  Innovation is also about anticipating the changes in consumer behaviour and the emerging trends in customer experience. We asked the Premier Inn team to share some of their predictions with us about how they saw customer experience evolving:

  ‘As I look at the trends, I think the whole digital online piece is where we see the future. Use of mobile, less voice, the whole digital platform is changing. How people make bookings, how people interact with us, use of third parties, metasearch. I think this is the biggest trend hitting us. We can’t see into the future but what we can do is deliver what we do, very well. Some of those things are not in our control, but I think as long as we go back to what we do and why we do it – and we do it really well – we shall succeed.’

  (Patrick Dempsey)

  ‘Clearly, we are looking to link the digital experience with some of our other above-the-line communication, so if you’re on the website today you will see a lot of the visual cues that you see in the TV campaign and some of our outdoor campaigns referenced on the website. We will also be talking about some of our innovations around things like our new beds in order to bring that to light in the digital platform.

  ‘I do think there is more we can do, both with the website itself, but also the consumer experience. So, you know, there’s no reason why, in the fullness of time, we won’t think about how we deliver a great night’s sleep through having apps. There are sleep apps that monitor the quality of your sleep, for example. You can think about things like pamper packs that help you to relax, we could record bedtime stories…’

  (Simon Jones)

  ‘Engaging customers and getting them to interact with both the brand and the experience, but more importantly with each other, will be key moving forward.

  ‘How do you start to think about digital beyond its transactional form and start to bring the experience to life digitally in a way that complements what customers experience physically? How do you even start to merge the two so that the physical and digital become one? How do you move beyond the transactional and start to think about informing customers, entertaining customers, communicating with customers and serving customers, all through digital platforms? I see that as the big challenge for us going forward.’

  (Mark Fells)

  Advice for other leaders

  Finally, we asked the Premier Inn team what advice they would give to executives starting out on a similar journey:

  ‘What I have learned is that you have to accept it’s going to take time to get the whole team to sign up to the final purpose, you can’t rush it – and don’t set off until you have, because everybody will challenge and test you on the way. You don’t want anybody wobbling because that will just derail the whole process. But, also be ready for the fact that it is very powerful. So when you get it right, it takes over your life. If you’re going to go through the pain and stress of defining it, and then writing it down and codifying your guest experience, then you’ve got to want to live it.’

  (John Forrest)

  ‘The lesson that I have learnt about being purpose-led is “Don’t treat it as a marketing exercise, but treat it as a broader business exercise”, and by that, I mean whatever statements you come up with for your purpose or your promise, you’ve got to really play through. Ensure that you can credibly deliver it and that it is genuinely hard wired into “the way we do things around here”. The second thing is that you’ve got to view it not as an exercise that you do at a point in time, but as a cultural shift.

  ‘We would say that we are only on the start of a five-year or 10-year programme and, hopefully, we have made a reasonably good start, but we can’t sit here and say that we are absolutely acing the delivery of our purpose, day-in-day-out. And until we have done that we won’t rest in our quest to making our guests feel brilliant through a great night’s sleep.’

  (Simon Jones)

  ‘To get people connected to a common purpose is absolutely the right thing to do, because you have 19,000 advocates out there rather than an exec team of seven. You feel it in every business that you go in, it feels like we’ve done something right, and I think that’s quite an achievement on behalf of the whole organization. It’s tough though, you’ve got to stand your ground and be bold. You need to convince your colleagues that it’s absolutely the right thing to do and the benefits that it will bring won’t happen unless you do it properly. But we have also had some fun and what we have come out with is some great material and a great platform to build a better organization, something that we can replicate right across a bigger business. It has been an inspirational road to be on, to go from nothing to something quite powerful, I think it is quite an achievement.’

  (Amanda Brady)

  Image 12.7 John Forrest, COO, Premier Inn, accepting the ‘Best Midscale Hotel Brand’ award at the UK’s ‘Business Travel Awards 2015’

  The Premier Inn team have been very generous in sharing what they learned as well as examples of their materials. I asked Amanda, ‘Aren’t you worried about confidentiality?’

  ‘People think they can just pick up all the material that we have developed and just launch it in their own business but my advice is that you can’t. You have to go on the journey and if you don’t you won’t be as well connected and it won’t be on purpose for you. Anyway, why would you want to be doing something that somebody else is doing?

  ‘I would say to anybody thinking about embarking on this journey, I believe you will reap the benefits but you will undoubtedly have some sticky moments but with them comes a great outcome. So don’t shy away from that. You should be bold.’

  (Amanda Brady)

  As we completed writing this chapter we heard the news that Premier Inn had been awarded ‘Best Midscale Hotel Brand’ at the UK’s ‘Business Travel Awards 2015’. The judges concluded: ‘This company has left no stone left unturned, reviewing, revisiting and continuously improving every element of its offering, from beds, technology, food, staff training and parking – the list is endless.’

  The other news that broke as we were completing our book was that Patrick Dempsey was moving on from Premier Inn, so we asked him what advice he would offer other managing directors, having achieved such a brilliant result at Premier Inn, as the final word:

  ‘My advice for anybody embarking on this journey is, first of all, create the sponsorship and leadership from the top of the organization. You’ve got to have somebody like John Forrest who is really going to lead; it has to be very clear that one person has to lead it and take it right throughout the organization. Make sure that it’s not just a one-year project; you’ve got to keep this going for three to five years. This journey of introducing a purpose and a vision is a bit like an advertising campaign; you’ve just got to keep it going, keep it going, keep it going, until it’s completely embedded in the organization.’

  So, in this chapter and the previous chapter we have introduced two inform
ative and, we hope, inspiring case studies about brands in different sectors with different challenges, cultures and business models – but with a common approach to implementing their purpose. So how can you apply these lessons to your own organization?

  Well, to make it easier for you we have created a toolkit of best practice tips, tools and techniques that you can find online:

  www.smithcoconsultancy.com/cem-toolkit.

  We hope that you have been inspired by these stories. We have tried to allow the tone of voice of these brands and the richness of their learning to shine through. However, if you would like to know even more about the On Purpose research, the leaders we interviewed and brands we studied, then turn to the next page.

  Note

  1 Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (2004) Confronting Reality: Doing what matters to get things right, Crown Business, New York.

  On purpose – multichannel

  The keynote presentation

  In this high-energy, engaging multimedia presentation we take you deep into the minds and thinking of the executives within these companies. We identify the key insights underlying these organizations’ success – principles that you can take away and apply to your business. You will be inspired to develop new ideas to exceed your customer expectations, and the knowledge to translate these ideas into practical actions that will accelerate your organization’s growth.

  In designing a keynote presentation to meet the specific needs of your event, we will draw upon those stories and examples from our research that are most likely to resonate with your audience and align with the themes of your conference.