Wow, where did this year go? This one, I swear, went faster than the last! A couple of years back, I started writing about my yearly learnings from starting and running a business. At my company, EffectUX, this year was filled with highs and lows, as is often the way. While there were some disappointments such as a collaboration that we put a lot of effort into that didn’t pan out as we’d hoped, there were lots of highs that we are so grateful for! With 2019 rolling around, here some of my lessons from the past year that I’ll be carrying forward!

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With current U.S. unemployment numbers as low as 1969 rates––3.7%, according to September 2018 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics––it’s a timely opportunity to evaluate the importance of good management in staff retention. Good management plays an integral role throughout the hiring lifecycle, and in retaining loyal employees. But how exactly does leadership-style affect employee satisfaction? And what’s transparent communication got to do with it?

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I recently caught up with Beekeeper’s Corey McCarthy to discuss employee engagement and culture; both topics that continue to be a focus area for businesses across all industries. With the percentage of ‘engaged’ workers in the U.S., (those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace) being reported at 34% by Gallup, there are many tools making their way into the market to help organizations increase this number ..

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Billions upon billions are spent on leadership training and development and studies demonstrate that many companies plan to increase this, with priorities including growing the succession pipeline, retaining high potential employees, and fostering innovation and creative thinking. Even with all of this investment, with the state of the leadership landscape, 77% of organizations are experiencing a leadership gap. Going beyond the typical skills you associate with leadership, in 2017 …

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With second half of the year upon us, many brands are reflecting where they are compared to their 2018 goals, as well as starting the processes for their planning and strategies for 2019. Sure enough, they completed these same processes and planning around the same time last year…and yet, in their latest CX results Forrester “revealed a CX leadership gap”.

We remembered writing about this problem towards the end of 2016 …

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Customer Journey Mapping, while having been around for quite some time, has certainly seen an increase in interest in the last few years. There are many great articles and content on what they are and how to do them.

The purpose of the Customer Journey Map is to deeply understand what your customer is trying to achieve, how they go about reaching this goal, and how each interaction they have with your company impacts them.

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“We do innovation” or, “we are innovative”, and numerous other phrases are used time and time again by leaders to explain just how innovate their organizations are. However, sometimes upon further discussion, sadly, you come to find that in reality they may have an Innovation Lab, rooms filled with white boards, lots of sticky notes, and sleep pods, but do not really have an environment, the people, the processes, or infrastructure in place to enable ideas to thrive, be tried, vetted, and brought into fruition strategically - for the benefit of their customers, employees, or the business.

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We were recently working with a company’s support organization helping them to elevate the experience of their face-to-face support services. Throughout the day we covered several topics with the engineers and managers of the support centers. While many components must come together to enable a great support experience, several barriers were discussed that hindered the engineers ability to deliver the desired experience. We thought these served as a nice reminder for

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