The Victorians. Inventors and explorers, or penny pinching scrooges? Discuss.
Unless you are an avid historian whichever answer you come up with will most likely be coloured by the costume drama you’ve just seen on TV or the book you have just read; but in truth, as in every society before and since, the answer is generally somewhere between the two. And as with every society, the majority of people got on with living undocumented and blameless lives in the best way they could whilst those few who did rise to public view have informed our viewpoint ever since.
But it does have to be said that the Victorians do epitomise the current dilemma facing businesses nowadays. For whilst some Victorians were gaily travelling the globe regardless of expense picking up rare plants and animals (and in the process making them even rarer), others were investing in the new industrial mills and factories and going all out to extract every ounce of value from their employees.
Fast forward in time and businesses today have the same dilemma. How do you extract the most value for your money when the drive is to provide ever more sophisticated products and ever better levels of customer service? Can you gaily sail out to engage with the world and still get a reasonable return for your investment? In fact is every penny saved a penny earned or in saving some pennies are you jeopardising pounds of sales?
The answer, as with everything in life, is not straightforward but whether you are looking for a return on investment or even a return on engagement the starting point is to implement a robust evaluation programme. Without evaluation you might just as well sail gaily off into the unknown armed with nothing more than a pith helmet and boundless optimism. With evaluation you can map out a clear understanding of the business drivers and the results of specific initiatives.
And evaluation works equally well for tangible and intangible initiatives. So whether you change a component within a product, embark on a social media campaign or take steps to improve employee engagement, an evaluation will highlight where you have been successful, and where you have wasted the pennies.
But with any evaluation, the golden rule is to make sure that it is an ongoing process. Business never stands still and the return on engagement in particular can often materialise some way down the line. The key is to design an evaluation process which is not so time consuming that it becomes self-defeating and for which care has been taken to agree the metrics with the sponsor in advance as well as highlighting other areas which may influence the impact.
This may take time but the rewards speak for themselves both in understanding the business and in preventing negative impacts. For example we are aware of one organisation which tracks employee engagement on a weekly basis and has proved that if the scores start to drop, three weeks later their customer satisfaction scores also drop. Another organisation’s evaluation proved that a 4% increase in employee engagement supported a 32% increase in Revenue.
Yes evaluation can be costly and take time. So does training, so does visiting customers, engaging in social media, advertising and a myriad of other business processes. In a restricted financial climate the temptation is to draw in the horns, to save every penny you can. But sometimes we need to resist that temptation and instead to go out and innovate, to explore and to seek out new markets and new customers and new ways of working. And if that costs money then it need not be wasted money as long as the metrics and the evaluations are in place. Which Victorian are you most like? Perhaps we should ask rather which would you like to be?
