Travelport is a global B2B business services company. They provide transaction processing solutions to connect buyers and sellers of travel.
Travelport was facing a critical juncture in its history. Recession has hit the travel industry disproportionately, as both businesses and individuals cut back significantly on travel. The lack of business has a very negative effect on employee motivation. Not only are people fearful of their jobs, but it's just sad when business is slow. On top of that, Travelport was bought by a Private Equity company and the ownership change was a shock. Finally, Travelport bought a major US competitor. The deal was perfect from a financial and synergy point of view, but employees were struggling from a cultural view. One side was a consensus-driven, slower decision-making culture, while the other side was an autocratic, fast decision-making culture. Both sides agreed that they wanted a different culture, but nobody knew how to get there.
Normally, HR worries about employee engagement, but the process is slow, and often doesn't get to the root of the issue. In the case of Travelport, it was Elizabeth Harroway, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Global Employee Communication, who decided to jump in and act. She felt that if Travelport didn't do something to engage its employees quickly, it would hurt the business. Management agreed, but as usual, they created pressure for her to come up with a solution that was cost-efficient, fast, and got results quick.
Elizabeth, together with Crispin Manners, CEO of ONVA consultants invented an ingenious application of NPS to measure the NPS of Travelport's own employees. After all, when an employee goes to work every day they are buying the promise the company made them when they were hired. Besides, Elizabeth and Crispin wanted to purposefully disrupt the way things were usually done in the company to get people's attention and jolt them out of business-as-usual. The plan senior management agreed to was simple:
- Listen to employees and prioritize what they tell us
- Engage them, don’t do everything top-down, find out what they know and think we can act on
- Create an action plan to do those things
In 2008 Elizabeth and Crispin ran a trial in one country. The questionnaire had only 6 questions and they got a 53% response rate (much higher than the typical employee engagement survey). Elizabeth and Crispin declined to share the actual score with us but gave us a hint: "It was crap." Management was alarmed. But at the same time, the verbatim feedback showed how badly the employees wanted to make changes and improvements in their business...they just hadn't been able to.
The two biggest surprises for management was not that employees wanted more pay or promotions. The number one thing they wanted was for management to listen to their ideas for doing business better and act on their feedback. The second surprise was that employees didn't want to be shielded from bad news - they wanted the straight story about the business environment and Travelport's real situation.
Results
Since then Travelport has rolled out NPS internally, and now does it on a rolling basis across the functions and they have a 90% response rate. Not surprisingly, their internal NPS has improved dramatically. Employees have a greater understanding of and buy-in to the strategy. Over 60% attended the CEO's Strategy Roadshow. By involving people in the process of change, Travelport created positive internal WOM. People who were involved in process improvements and had a say in it talked to everyone else about it.
Learning points
Elizabeth and Crispin shared their learning with us:
- Counsel senior management to look beyond the score to the verbatim feedback. Management sometimes jump to fast conclusions on "scores". Good scores means nothings wrong. Bad scores means our people are no good and we should replace them...it's difficult to accept bad scores are a measure of the employees' experience of the company...as created by the managers. When they see the verbatims, they begin to understand what life is like for their employees.
- Always be sure to close the loop….just by listening to employees, Travelport's score improved by 31% in only 6 months even though market was getting worse and people were suffering pay freezes and cost-cutting.
- Turn employees into advisors. When the Managing Director communicated the a dire economic situation out to employees, he signed off with "We’re in a bad situation, if you have any ideas just email me." People loved it, they sent in their ideas, many of which were good and some of which were implemented to postive effect. Travelport also held an "idea storm" online, where everyone could share ideas openly, and rate other people’s ideas.
- Our employees are smarter than we thought. Employee Advisor Groups leverage wisdom of the masses and come up with better ideas than Focus Groups, which represent the opinions of the few.
- Employees don’t care about the score, they care about the issue. So don't talk to employees (or customers) about the score, tell them how you're fixing the problems they raised.
- It's not a bad thing when your own employees are loyal promoters of your business and expert consultants on how to do better!
- Internal feedback often addressed customer-facing issues. So now Travelport has started doing NPS with customers. They are studying correlations between what employees and customers say
