The Boeing Company (pronounced /ˈboʊ.ɪŋ/) is an American multinational aerospace and defense corporation, founded in 1916 by William E. Boeing in Seattle, Washington. Boeing has expanded over the years, merging with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. Boeing Corporate headquarters has been in Chicago, Illinois[2] since 2001. Boeing is made up of multiple business units, which are Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA); Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS); Engineering, Operations & Technology; Boeing Capital; and Boeing Shared Services Group.
Boeing is among the largest global aircraft manufacturers by revenue, orders and deliveries, and the third largest aerospace and defense contractor in the world based on defense-related revenue.[3] Boeing is the largest exporter by value in the United States.[4] Its stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The project has forced team members to ask tough questions like: “What is the future of work going to look like in 2016, and how can Boeing prepare today?” Once a consensus was reached, the answer became more apparent. “The people, the space, and the practices - where all [of those] connect in the middle - is really the solution we’re trying to find,” explains Dick Stewart, manager, Future of Work, Boeing, Renton, WA. As the team’s project leader (with 20 years of facilities, project-management, and strategic-planning experience), Stewart helped turn big-picture thinking into realizable directives. However, he wasn’t the only subject-matter expert championing the project. At times, as many as a dozen people were spending between 10 and 20 hours per week on Future of Work.
The core team members consisted of professionals from the facilities, human resources, information technology, and communications departments, all of which are part of Boeing’s shared services group. While some organizations struggle to open the interdepartmental lines of communication, the Future of Work team was no stranger to synergy. “We work together a lot. What was exciting about this was that, rather than working together like we might have in the past to design a specific building, [we were] creating a model that can be duplicated in different places around the company,” says Marilee Noble, manager, business continuity, Boeing, Renton, WA.
Noble offered input and expertise on infrastructure and technology, and helped make informed decisions about the tools that enable employees to work anywhere and any time. “From experience, we knew that we needed to bring IT in up front. The connectivity inside a building is now just as important as the electricity, the air-conditioning, or the plumbing that runs through it,” says Jeffrey Hobbs, manager, strategic planning, Boeing, Renton, WA.
Representation from human resources provided insight into how new facility standards and changes in work processes could be beneficial for employee recruitment and retention over the next decade. Six professionals from the HR team were tapped for their expertise.
Involvement from Stephen Davis (of Boeing’s communications department) ensured that the Future of Work project would integrate branding into the real property strategy. Promoting the company’s accomplishments creates pride in the current workforce while generating interest from future workers; communicating and displaying consistent messages were important elements of the Future of Work project and had a bigger impact on interior and exterior design of company facilities than imagined.
And, with help from Andrea Vanecko, principal-in-charge of corporate office interior design at Seattle-based Callison, the Future of Work project team was complete. Her philosophy of “space as a business tool” and her work on Callison’s Future@Work™ exhibit made Vanecko a natural choice when the team decided to hire a consultant.
This expenditure of time and money does nothing to give a manager or an organization a competitive edge. However, despite these known costs and loss of productivity, a research company reports 54 percent of businesses do nothing to create a high-retention culture or reduce high employee turnover. The revolving door keeps moving – employees leave, managers interview and hire more workers, allowing competitors with low turnover to focus more on productivity.
People want to be part of an organization that stands for something that provides them with personal fulfillment and meaning. Singapore International Airlines (SIA) prides itself on customer service. They improved retention ratios by placing more time and effort in the selection and training of employees and aligned the training to support the organization’s mission goal of providing excellent customer service. Today when customers are happy, they express their appreciation to SIA employees who are proud of being on the SIA team.
General Ulysses S. Grant once said, "There are no bad soldiers, only bad leaders" to remind us that poor leaders and managers can be a problem and on-going leadership development is critical.
Businesses must focus on workplace flexibility to stay competitive. The downsized, super competitive work environment of today often forces employees into putting their family in a secondary position. The Randstad North American Employee Review recently found in a survey that only 34 percent of the American employees now want a traditional full-time job.
Communication talks. In 1995, the Boeing Company suffered its second-longest walkout ever when the Machinists Union led a 69-day strike. Boeing lost hundreds of millions of dollars and experienced big customer service headaches when they missed the delivery dates on 36 planes. Boeing’s President, Frank Shrontz, later acknowledged the strike was a result of management’s failure to communicate with the workforce about their concerns. UPS provides another example where they lost over $700 million in revenues and customer trust when UPS failed to communicate with their workforce.
People want to enjoy their work environment. Some work is boring, but findings suggest providing employees something to talk about – future goals they can conquer or results that have been achieved. Sports teams keep players motivated. Often organizational bureaucracy kills the spirit and ideas of employees who want to contribute.
Rewards and recognition are critical to achieving organizational goals. All humans need to feel appreciated. In a survey conducted by Robert Half International, the results showed that recognition and praise was the number one reason employees stay in their work environment with fair compensation being secondary. Smith’s book provides low-cost, easy to implement, "fair" recognition programs that keep people focused and heading in the right direction.
Employees migrate to training and career development opportunities. If employees are blocked into a specific or dead end job with no opportunity for promotion or variety, they will leave – especially Gen X and Gen Y workers. An ASTD study showed that leading-edge companies trained 86 percent of their employees whereas average companies trained only 74 percent. Companies that invest in workplace learning yielded higher net sales and gross profits per employee.
Most businesses spend more time and energy trying to find new customers instead of retaining those they have. The logic behind customer retention is simple–It costs far less money to keep customers happy than to spend much more money recruiting new ones. Loyal customers tell their friends about your business and will spend more money than new customers.
I dread eating at airports. If you travel as much as I do, you are probably familiar with the "3 b’s" as it applies to airport fare–bad food, bad attitudes, bad timing.
I had an early flight to catch at the Ontario, California airport recently. I found myself standing outside the closed and gated doorway to an Applebee’s restaurant ten minutes before they opened up. I just knew they would be late and expected to receive the usual grumpy service common at most airports the world over. I was wrong!
Bam! The clock struck five, the lights popped on and this charming lady opened the doors. She greeted me with a smile, a warm "hello" and told me to sit anywhere I wanted. I never had seen such a positive attitude at 5:00 in the morning.
For the next hour, I watched Felicia cheerfully greet customers, many of which she called by name. They were the "regulars" she said. Felicia was the remarkable person who made that small restaurant pleasant and memorable. Next time I return to the Ontario Airport, I guarantee you this is the restaurant I am going to first.
Here are seven steps to build customer loyalty.
1. Select the right people. In the book, From Good to Great, Jim Collins said, "People are not your most important asset, the RIGHT people are." Most businesses do a poor job of hiring people. They hire just anyone and place them on the front-line with customers. Spend more time recruiting and hiring the right people with good personalities. Focus on those who are friendly and demonstrate an interest and enthusiasm for the job. Consider using personality profiles as part of the hiring process. These profiles help identify true personality characteristics of your applicants.
2. Sensationalize the experience for your customers. Good service is not good enough. A Gallup survey showed a customer who is “emotionally connected” to your place of business is likely to spend 46% more money than a customer who is merely "satisfied" but not emotionally bonded.
3. Set performance standards. Outline the behaviors of how employees should act, speak, and respond to customer needs and requests. One of our clients developed a list of twenty customer service commandments that outline actions he wanted his service people to demonstrate.
4. Sustain on-going training and reinforcement. Good customer service skills are not natural for most people. Effective customer service training must be reinforced and taught on a recurring basis. For example, the Ritz-Carlton hotels provide a thorough customer service training program for all of its employees during their orientation. Then each supervisor conducts a daily "line-up" to review one of the commandments with his employees ten minutes before each shift.
5. Specify incentives for good behavior. Yes, employees want to be paid well, but they also want to be treated with respect and shown appreciation. The front-line supervisor has the greatest impact on motivating and retaining employees. Reward those who exceed the standards and provide development for those who do not.
6. Survey your customers and reduce your defection rate. On average, businesses lose 15-20 percent of their customers each year to their competition. All businesses encounter this defection rate, but few do much about it. To improve retention, one client sends out a customer service report card to its top customers every month. This requires an evaluation based on four specific criteria. They tally the results and make sure employees see the scores. This motivates the employees to do a better job
• One in four plans on leaving within the year
• One in three are not putting their entire effort in their job
• One in five believe their personal goals are quite different from what the organization has planned for them
• Four out of ten have little confidence in their senior leadership and coworkers
The key to success for any organization is the ability to attract and retain skilled and talented people. Those that fail to make employee retention a priority now risk losing their top talented people to the competition. This webseminar shows you how to design an effective employee retention strategy that provides a comprehensive road map for not only attracting and keeping talented employees, but for motivating and engaging them to achieve a higher level of performance. This session is jam packed with tips, ideas, and easy-to-implement advice for creating a high-retention culture.
Boeing is among the largest global aircraft manufacturers by revenue, orders and deliveries, and the third largest aerospace and defense contractor in the world based on defense-related revenue.[3] Boeing is the largest exporter by value in the United States.[4] Its stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The project has forced team members to ask tough questions like: “What is the future of work going to look like in 2016, and how can Boeing prepare today?” Once a consensus was reached, the answer became more apparent. “The people, the space, and the practices - where all [of those] connect in the middle - is really the solution we’re trying to find,” explains Dick Stewart, manager, Future of Work, Boeing, Renton, WA. As the team’s project leader (with 20 years of facilities, project-management, and strategic-planning experience), Stewart helped turn big-picture thinking into realizable directives. However, he wasn’t the only subject-matter expert championing the project. At times, as many as a dozen people were spending between 10 and 20 hours per week on Future of Work.
The core team members consisted of professionals from the facilities, human resources, information technology, and communications departments, all of which are part of Boeing’s shared services group. While some organizations struggle to open the interdepartmental lines of communication, the Future of Work team was no stranger to synergy. “We work together a lot. What was exciting about this was that, rather than working together like we might have in the past to design a specific building, [we were] creating a model that can be duplicated in different places around the company,” says Marilee Noble, manager, business continuity, Boeing, Renton, WA.
Noble offered input and expertise on infrastructure and technology, and helped make informed decisions about the tools that enable employees to work anywhere and any time. “From experience, we knew that we needed to bring IT in up front. The connectivity inside a building is now just as important as the electricity, the air-conditioning, or the plumbing that runs through it,” says Jeffrey Hobbs, manager, strategic planning, Boeing, Renton, WA.
Representation from human resources provided insight into how new facility standards and changes in work processes could be beneficial for employee recruitment and retention over the next decade. Six professionals from the HR team were tapped for their expertise.
Involvement from Stephen Davis (of Boeing’s communications department) ensured that the Future of Work project would integrate branding into the real property strategy. Promoting the company’s accomplishments creates pride in the current workforce while generating interest from future workers; communicating and displaying consistent messages were important elements of the Future of Work project and had a bigger impact on interior and exterior design of company facilities than imagined.
And, with help from Andrea Vanecko, principal-in-charge of corporate office interior design at Seattle-based Callison, the Future of Work project team was complete. Her philosophy of “space as a business tool” and her work on Callison’s Future@Work™ exhibit made Vanecko a natural choice when the team decided to hire a consultant.
This expenditure of time and money does nothing to give a manager or an organization a competitive edge. However, despite these known costs and loss of productivity, a research company reports 54 percent of businesses do nothing to create a high-retention culture or reduce high employee turnover. The revolving door keeps moving – employees leave, managers interview and hire more workers, allowing competitors with low turnover to focus more on productivity.
People want to be part of an organization that stands for something that provides them with personal fulfillment and meaning. Singapore International Airlines (SIA) prides itself on customer service. They improved retention ratios by placing more time and effort in the selection and training of employees and aligned the training to support the organization’s mission goal of providing excellent customer service. Today when customers are happy, they express their appreciation to SIA employees who are proud of being on the SIA team.
General Ulysses S. Grant once said, "There are no bad soldiers, only bad leaders" to remind us that poor leaders and managers can be a problem and on-going leadership development is critical.
Businesses must focus on workplace flexibility to stay competitive. The downsized, super competitive work environment of today often forces employees into putting their family in a secondary position. The Randstad North American Employee Review recently found in a survey that only 34 percent of the American employees now want a traditional full-time job.
Communication talks. In 1995, the Boeing Company suffered its second-longest walkout ever when the Machinists Union led a 69-day strike. Boeing lost hundreds of millions of dollars and experienced big customer service headaches when they missed the delivery dates on 36 planes. Boeing’s President, Frank Shrontz, later acknowledged the strike was a result of management’s failure to communicate with the workforce about their concerns. UPS provides another example where they lost over $700 million in revenues and customer trust when UPS failed to communicate with their workforce.
People want to enjoy their work environment. Some work is boring, but findings suggest providing employees something to talk about – future goals they can conquer or results that have been achieved. Sports teams keep players motivated. Often organizational bureaucracy kills the spirit and ideas of employees who want to contribute.
Rewards and recognition are critical to achieving organizational goals. All humans need to feel appreciated. In a survey conducted by Robert Half International, the results showed that recognition and praise was the number one reason employees stay in their work environment with fair compensation being secondary. Smith’s book provides low-cost, easy to implement, "fair" recognition programs that keep people focused and heading in the right direction.
Employees migrate to training and career development opportunities. If employees are blocked into a specific or dead end job with no opportunity for promotion or variety, they will leave – especially Gen X and Gen Y workers. An ASTD study showed that leading-edge companies trained 86 percent of their employees whereas average companies trained only 74 percent. Companies that invest in workplace learning yielded higher net sales and gross profits per employee.
Most businesses spend more time and energy trying to find new customers instead of retaining those they have. The logic behind customer retention is simple–It costs far less money to keep customers happy than to spend much more money recruiting new ones. Loyal customers tell their friends about your business and will spend more money than new customers.
I dread eating at airports. If you travel as much as I do, you are probably familiar with the "3 b’s" as it applies to airport fare–bad food, bad attitudes, bad timing.
I had an early flight to catch at the Ontario, California airport recently. I found myself standing outside the closed and gated doorway to an Applebee’s restaurant ten minutes before they opened up. I just knew they would be late and expected to receive the usual grumpy service common at most airports the world over. I was wrong!
Bam! The clock struck five, the lights popped on and this charming lady opened the doors. She greeted me with a smile, a warm "hello" and told me to sit anywhere I wanted. I never had seen such a positive attitude at 5:00 in the morning.
For the next hour, I watched Felicia cheerfully greet customers, many of which she called by name. They were the "regulars" she said. Felicia was the remarkable person who made that small restaurant pleasant and memorable. Next time I return to the Ontario Airport, I guarantee you this is the restaurant I am going to first.
Here are seven steps to build customer loyalty.
1. Select the right people. In the book, From Good to Great, Jim Collins said, "People are not your most important asset, the RIGHT people are." Most businesses do a poor job of hiring people. They hire just anyone and place them on the front-line with customers. Spend more time recruiting and hiring the right people with good personalities. Focus on those who are friendly and demonstrate an interest and enthusiasm for the job. Consider using personality profiles as part of the hiring process. These profiles help identify true personality characteristics of your applicants.
2. Sensationalize the experience for your customers. Good service is not good enough. A Gallup survey showed a customer who is “emotionally connected” to your place of business is likely to spend 46% more money than a customer who is merely "satisfied" but not emotionally bonded.
3. Set performance standards. Outline the behaviors of how employees should act, speak, and respond to customer needs and requests. One of our clients developed a list of twenty customer service commandments that outline actions he wanted his service people to demonstrate.
4. Sustain on-going training and reinforcement. Good customer service skills are not natural for most people. Effective customer service training must be reinforced and taught on a recurring basis. For example, the Ritz-Carlton hotels provide a thorough customer service training program for all of its employees during their orientation. Then each supervisor conducts a daily "line-up" to review one of the commandments with his employees ten minutes before each shift.
5. Specify incentives for good behavior. Yes, employees want to be paid well, but they also want to be treated with respect and shown appreciation. The front-line supervisor has the greatest impact on motivating and retaining employees. Reward those who exceed the standards and provide development for those who do not.
6. Survey your customers and reduce your defection rate. On average, businesses lose 15-20 percent of their customers each year to their competition. All businesses encounter this defection rate, but few do much about it. To improve retention, one client sends out a customer service report card to its top customers every month. This requires an evaluation based on four specific criteria. They tally the results and make sure employees see the scores. This motivates the employees to do a better job
• One in four plans on leaving within the year
• One in three are not putting their entire effort in their job
• One in five believe their personal goals are quite different from what the organization has planned for them
• Four out of ten have little confidence in their senior leadership and coworkers
The key to success for any organization is the ability to attract and retain skilled and talented people. Those that fail to make employee retention a priority now risk losing their top talented people to the competition. This webseminar shows you how to design an effective employee retention strategy that provides a comprehensive road map for not only attracting and keeping talented employees, but for motivating and engaging them to achieve a higher level of performance. This session is jam packed with tips, ideas, and easy-to-implement advice for creating a high-retention culture.