Last week, we held two major SPUD planning sessions, one in Seattle for our American staff and one in Vancouver for our Canadian staff.  Both sessions were two days long and both were a great success.

Last year we foolishly decided not to have a planning session because we wanted to save money during the recession.  I really regret that decision because what we gained from those sessions in terms of staff morale and great ideas,  far exceeded the costs to bring the staff together.

As I listened to the staff present their ideas on how we could improve our operations and the customer experience it occurred to me that we don’t need to hire external specialists to help grow our business.    Our staff already have the solutions; we just need to ask them the right questions and create a space for them to share them.

While we have strived to create a culture where the staff are encouraged to provide suggestions, the planning sessions revealed that we haven’t been doing a very good a job.   For a variety of reasons, their ideas simply weren’t getting through to the people who needed to act on them.

I have learned that this is the case in many organizations.  After the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986 a followup investigation revealed that the managers disregarded warnings from the engineers that there was a fatal flaw in the O-Ring design and failed to report them to their superiors.

What I learned from the planning sessions is that if you actively ask the staff for their ideas and listen deeply to their answers, you will get amazing results.  For example, one of our staff mentioned to our Information Systems manager, that there  were some browser compatability issues on our website for Mac Users.  As it turned out, she had tried several times to tell head office staff about the problem but she was simply told to “press F5 and it will fix the problem.”   My information systems manager could hardly believe that no one had told him about a problem that would potentially bother a bunch of customers, especially when it only took him a couple of hours to completely fix the problem once he had been informed about it.

When the staff we asked to list their top four ways that we could improve the customer experience, many of them talked about how our customers get annoyed with us when they believe that we have not properly refunded their freezer jacket deposits.  It was clear that this was creating enough dissatisfaction that we decided right then and there to stop charging deposits on freezer jackets and trust that our customers will return them.

On the first evening of both sessions,  the staff got together for dinner at a local restaurant and it thrilled me greatly to watch staff from different locations have a chance to talk casually together.

At the end of both sessions, the staff reported that the sessions were very worthwhile and I get the clear sense that they really meant it.  I know I found it immensely productive and have made a mental note to myself to organize many more opportunities for the staff to gather face to face and tackle our biggest challenges.

I am keen to begin implementing the many great ideas that came from the planning session and hopefully our customers will soon see the results in an improved customer experience.