There are several strategies how to generate growth and build strategic partnership with customers. Prohoc has 25 years of experience in project and manufacturing industry services, and that journey in service business has taught us that growth and good partnerships start with a combination of loyal and satisfied employees and high-quality services.
The service value chain model (Fig. 1) has been the backbone of our mission for several years. The logic of service business is simple: business profit and growth are stimulated by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a deliverable of customer satisfaction and satisfaction is heavily impacted by the value of the service we provide to our customers.
The core of service-profit chain – and the core of our mission – is that service value is created by satisfied, loyal and productive employees. This needs to be supported by high-quality internal services and leadership that enable and empower employees to create value. Easily to be described in couple of paragraphs, but as we know, requires a delicate strategy to be executed.
DRIVING GROWTH IS SIMPLE – YET SO DIFFICULT
During 2021 we were successful in taking the next step in our growth journey. We trialed and errored many growth opportunities and were successful in couple of them. To really create growth, one needs to accept that not all initiatives will make it. We need to increase the speed of this learning cycle and utilize the key findings for the next one. It all starts with people that have courage to go there in times of uncertainty and accept a possible failure, and the right transformative leadership to serve that. When it then comes to execution and scaling, it’s all about clarity of the vision, concentrating on the jobs to be done and finally preserving the energy needed to finish of all that work. On the execution phase, it might be even so that less is more – to do fewer things that are the most important than the other way around.
EMPOWERING EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
We have set our most important strategic objective to be the workplace that enables best employee experience of the industry. Heskett et al. study indicates, that working environment impacts the most to employee satisfaction. In our business employee satisfaction generates from our culture, workplace and job design, exact talent acquisition, good leadership in the form of feedback and recognition, and giving our employees the right tools to serve our customers.
“Based on our wellbeing survey and interviews, the clarity of job requirements, getting feedback, and safety in form of visibility to future projects are important”, says Kia Lettelin-Kock, Employee Experience Specialist at Prohoc.
Our certified (ISO45001) employee health and safety management system contains several objectives and policies to ensure internal quality and good employee experience. It provides a good system and measures to manage talents. In the end, the employee satisfaction is measured by the feelings that employees have toward their jobs, colleagues, customers, and company.
Same importance of feelings and satisfaction applies to talent acquisition. Shortage and struggle for candidates is no longer the tragedy of ICT industry only, project experts and manufacturing competences are getting rare too. Instead of putting candidates to serve the acquisition process we have turned it the other way around: To find, serve and add value to the candidates and match jobs and their needs are important parts of our internal service quality.
#Empoweringpeople has been our strategy hashtag for years. We believe that putting focus on things that generate employee satisfaction is a key to successful business.
References:
Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work. James L. Heskett et al., 2008. Harward Business Review
Sisäinen motivaatio (In Finnish). 2014. Frank Martela & Karoliina Jarenko.
Eduskunnan tulevaisuusvaliokunnan julkaisu 3/2014
