5 tips to introduce simplicity in your business culture
If your company is striving for more customer centricity, adopting the concept of simplicity might contribute to achieving just that. In a previous article, we explained two reasons why designing a simple customer experience brings more customer centricity. First, it compels your company to offer high quality standards regarding all your interactions with your customers. Second, it also forces you to gather deep knowledge about how your customers interact with your business (read the full article on the topic here). Today, we will share some advice on how to apply the principle of simplicity inside your company.
It is not an easy task to deliver a simple outcome. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal apologised once with those words “I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time”. Often, customers face complicated tasks as a result of internal company procedures that no one took the time to adapt to be more customer centric. If your company chooses the path towards simplicity, this principle will have to become one of the core value of your company culture. All employees should be concerned of delivering simple outputs and all decisions should take into account this criterion.
Here are five tips to embed simplicity into the culture of your organisation:
1. MAKE SIMPLICITY A PART OF YOUR BUSINESS STRATEGY
First of all, simplicity should not be seen solely as a nice virtue for your employees to exhibit, it has to become part of the organisational strategy. This ambition will need to be translated into specific targets to tackle the complexity inside the organisation. To make these objectives tangible, the key areas of improvement should be identified and coupled with clear ambitions. Employee performance metrics can also be designed to stimulate employees in achieving simple outcomes.
2. ADAPT THE INTERNAL PROCESSES
If you expect your employees to deliver simple solutions, they need to operate in an environment as simple as possible. The reduction of the layers is usually a good place to start to simplify organisational structures. With fewer layers, people who are closer to the action receive more responsibilities to become proactive. This model can simplify the control procedures and the decision making processes because it requires less time and procedures to coordinate or inform the multiple levels that the company would have.
Each layer added to the organisational structure brings more complexity and hampers the delivery of simple outcomes
image source: Dennis Locke, Managing in matrix and more complex organisations
3. ENCOURAGE COLLABORATION
Knowledge is a strong enabler of simplification. Everyone working in the organisation will perform better with a greater understanding about who does what in the company. If you want to achieve simplicity at a large scale, synergies will have to emerge inside your organisation to cultivate a culture of sharing knowledge. Collaboration fosters the emergence of free flows of information and can replace rigid procedures. You can choose among the many technics that stimulate collaboration to strengthen the transversal links of your organisation. You should also reward and give recognition to the staff members who take collaborative initiatives.
4. CLARIFY THE GOVERNANCE
You will not succeed in achieving simplicity if you do not define clearly the decision structure in your organization. The uncertainty about who has the authority to take a specific decision can represent a major source of complexity. The creation of decision structures - like councils or committees – with well-defined scope of decision power can simplify decision process for transversal projects for instance. The planning, budgeting and other operating processes should be aligned accordingly. Empowering employees at the grassroots level can also reduce the complexity for them to initiate new projects or react to poor performances.
5. SHOW LEADERSHIP
Every change in the culture of an organisation requires leadership. As simplicity must be taken into account by all employees in their own jobs, you will have to educate and on board people. Besides good communication skills, you will have to confront and overcome roadblocks. It requires charisma, empathy but also to be a role model in terms of simplicity.
Implementing the concept of simplicity inside your company will have to impact the behaviours and beliefs of all your employees. Whenever a decision is made, a project team assembled or a document shown to a customer, the person in charge should always wonder if what he is doing is simple. If the cultural shift is successful, the benefits will be numerous (from higher customer & employee satisfaction to more efficient internal process). It will require a lot of efforts to get there but aligning all your employees on the principle of simplicity is worth the investment.
Each year, around Christmas, I have fun reading the predictions for the following year, and, depending on what I read, my mood balances between amusement, doubt, glee or even sometimes anger. In 15 years of experience in digital, I have seen the “hype cycle” of Gartner evolve through time, right or wrong, too optimistic or too pessimistic. But its easy to criticise and never do the exercise - so this year, it’s my turn to dip my toe into it and we’ll see in the coming years if I was right or wrong.