Branding Begins at Home
Every business needs the confidence and faith of its employees, and all managers want to earn the respect and confidence of their staffs. When considering tools to support the development of these important organizational needs, an electronic enterprise system may not be the first thing that comes to mind. Indeed, employee confidence may be the only thing business system manufacturers aren’t promising to transform within the organization.
Yet deployment of a new system may have a profound impact on the organization’s internal brand. Within the mind of every member of the corporation is an impression of the company—its values, its products, and its people. Is this organization smart, caring, and innovative, or is it an organization with conservative values and plodding methods?
Like the impressions we carry in our minds of people we’ve just met and people we’ve known for a lifetime, employees also form impressions of their employers.
I’ve met dozens of physicians who have expressed disgust with the systems they are required to use at their respective hospitals. One doctor rolled her eyes as she described the scenario of ordering blood, and told how she sends a human runner to the blood bank rather than interact with a computer system that is too slow. Technically, the system could get the request to the bank at lightning speed. The unfortunate reality is that the system made it difficult to transmit that request in an acceptable amount of time. When the physician described the scenario to me, she made a number of disparaging comments about the decision makers who buy and deploy these systems, saying that “they don’t understand what we really need” and that “they’re out of touch.”
A system that unnecessarily challenges employees will damage the employees’ opinion of their employer, or at least the reputation of the managers who decided to deploy such a tool.
It’s said that a shoddy craftsman blames his tools. But when the tools are unresponsive, confusing, and outright difficult to use, the craftsman may be justified in blaming not only the tools, but also the provider of the tools—the organization. A brand impression begins at home, within the organization, and an inferior tool can adversely impact one of an organization’s most valuable assets.
— Excerpted from Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate . by Harold Hambrose (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York). Order your copy of this book.
