Many companies, and the individuals in them, suffer from a self-imposed version of Orwell’s world. The person that starts asking the tough questions is quelled by management or ultimately leaves the organization in defeat. Companies stop questioning the ways they have always done business, and ultimately create a fabricated and inflated view of themselves.

These companies are now in a state of atrophy and can’t understand why they are not growing, not attracting top talent, and are generally directionless. The solution begins with the asking of simple questions. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Who are our clients and when was the last time we talked to one face-to-face?
• Do our clients promote us to others? If not, why not?
• What is our current business strategy?
• Do our employees know the strategy and where they fit into it?
• Why are we in business and what is our company’s vision?

Toyota terms this culture of questioning the ‘Toyota Way’, or continuous improvement. American automakers have spent the last 20+ years trying to imitate the success of Toyota, but they have continually failed. They are still not ready to cultivate a corporate culture that encourages questioning at all levels of the business. Successful businesses, like Toyota, are able to pull this off.

They say you learn everything you ever need to know in kindergarten. Today I attended an orientation event at my daughter’s elementary school. The principal gave us parents some sage advice on what we should be doing to prepare our kids for kindergarten:

1. Read to them
2. Read to them
3. Read to them
4. Keep an open dialogue with them, and ask lots of questions.

This advice applies beautifully and simply to those of us in the business world. The written word, in all its forms from Orwell to Deming, is a powerful tool for shaping your company and your own personal worldview. It will spark you to question and never stop, which builds stronger, focused, and more passionate businesses.

We are accepting registrations through November and the winners will be announced in March of 2010.  To sign up head over to www.bestofstaffing.com.

Second failure, once I allowed images to be shown for the third-party email address that Adobe was using, the image was basically just text in image form.  On top of that, none of the links worked.  This is due to the use of an image map, which isn’t supported across all email applications.

In our many years of doing online satisfaction surveys we know that the email survey invitation is critical to gaining a good response rate from your clients and customers.  This email from Adobe provides a good example of common mistakes that lead to low response rates.  These two main failures will drop the response rate significantly for Adobe.

A few easy changes would make this campaign much more successful:

1. Take all of the text out of the image and include it in the email as actual text, so email recipients with blocked images actually see something in the email when they open it.
2. Take the Adobe logo and make a single image of just that, and include it in the email.  Making sure to set the alt text so the email recipient knows what it is even if images are being blocked.
3. Personalize it!  They know who I am, so include my name in there somewhere.  We find this improves response rate as well.

Many things were done right, including:

1. Company name was in the subject line.  We find this improves open rates on the emails.
2. Plain text version of the email was included as well, which helps avoiding spam filters.
3. All of the proper CAN-SPAM stuff is in there, like unsubscribe instructions and such.

I’m going on month #2 with Inavero and as I sit here soaking in the tunes of Green Day over the office speakers… four key things come to mind that make Inavero different and better. Give’em a try.

1. Trust:  Hire people you believe are smart and will do their best, and let them.
2. Respect:  Treat your employees the way you want them to treat your clients. The reflection is transparent.
3. Listen:  Be open for innovation from all tiers of your company.
4. Have fun! Tour the Street of Dream, have Beer + Strategy sessions each week, and celebrate birthdays with SkinnyDip Ice Cream!

Granted, I’m still swimming in the ‘honeymoon’ phase of my new position, but it’s refreshing to be swimming with dolphins and not stomping through the tangled tundra with lions, and tigers, and bears.

Over on Andrew Chen’s blog he recently posted a fascinating article on the correlation of interview performance to long-term job performance.  If he is right, what does this mean for the staffing and recruiting industry?  Read his article below and feel free to provide your thoughts below.

What if interviews poorly predict job performance? What if dating poorly predicts marital happiness?

Four simple reasons why I love Rackspace so much:

1. Support – I can IM with them 24×7x365!  No more “on-call” pager numbers = no more guilt when I contact support at 1AM.
2. Killer Product – the Cloud Sites and Servers are so easy to use and scale exactly as promised.
3. Communication – I always know if something is being planned that could affect my sites and even get nice emails warning me of issues with my Cloud Server and how to resolve them.
4. Fanatical Client Service – At Inavero we specialize in measuring a firms attention to client service, so I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Rackspace is definitely a good egg.

I have one final example of why I love the client centeredness of Rackspace so much.  Rackspace recently experienced some failures in it’s technology systems that ended up affecting their clients.  The client recovery from these failures is the best I have ever experienced with a technology services company.  Below is a video that the CEO released within days of the outages that goes into great detail explaining what happened, sincerely apologizing for the downtime, and detailing what they will change to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  This is how exceptional companies recover from failure.  They take 100% of the blame and quickly move to make things right.  Way to go Rackspace!

1. The staffing industry employed nearly 800,000 fewer people in the first quarter compared to the same time period in 2008, a 28% decline.
2. Industry sales declined in a similar pattern, declining nearly $5 billion, or 27%.

Why then, do I feel this burden lifting?  This feeling I have – not quite optimism, not completely relief, but with remnants of both – it started about a month ago, and it is (slowly) getting stronger each day.  We’re hearing from our clients, and seeing evidence from my other favorite indicator, ASA’s weekly staffing index, that we are at least testing a bottom.

The questions I am getting now are more around what I think the recovery will look like (sharp, or gradual), and when I think we’ll start to pull the nose of the plane back up, now that it has leveled.  I believe we will be down in this trough throughout the summer, but I think staffing will start to maintain significant week-over-week growth starting in early August.  When it happens, I am expecting it to be more gradual than historical figures would suggest (which are dramatic), but less gradual than following 2001 where I believe massive productivity gains made through technology improvements slowed the need for staffing as we emerged from the recession.

What do you think?  Are we at a bottom?  When will we start to emerge?  Will staffing grow sharply or gradually during the recovery?  Leave your thoughts in the comments.

What does it mean for staffing and recruiting?  My take is that we’ve seen the worst of it.  We may be walking along the bottom for a while, but I truly think we have found a bottom.  Why do I think it?  Take a look at the American Staffing Association’s weekly staffing index.  The industry took a hard and long fall from the cliff, but seems to be flattening out at the new level over the past 2 to 3 months.  When will we start to increase?  Not sure, but if you can sustain the level you’re at now for a while, my expectation is that short of any major shocks to the system, the industry will be flat for a bit, and once the ASA index starts to jump, we think it will be sustainable.

What is everyone else experiencing?  When do you expect to start back up?  Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Within the professional service environment, clients make a conscious decision about their willingness to participate in your client satisfaction survey. The equation, in my experience, is simply the ratio of perceived value (enhanced service, etc.) to the perceived amount of time spent (cost). I use the term perceived multiple times for a reason. The perception is truly reality here and there are things you can do to improve the perception of value (pre-survey description of the client program, follow-up letter describing what was learned, etc.) and the perception of time spent (our subject lines often include the actual number of questions, such as “two questions about your recent experience with us). If you have designed a brief survey, do everything in your power to get the benefit of that in your response rate.

Finally, the most important mistake that professional service firms make with their surveys is assuming they need to come up with 3 action items and implement them across the firm, and across multiple offices. While there may be a few “global” changes that come from survey findings, the most important step (often overlooked) is to get the information to the people who can change it. If Jane feels like she doesn’t get a quick enough response, Jane’s professional contact in the firm should a) know that, b) act on that, and c) be held accountable for improving Jane’s perception. It is that simple, it is that direct, and it is that important.

The system relies on “a variety of factors when rating businesses, including consumer complaint volume, nature of complaints, and company responsiveness to customer concerns.” Any customer satisfaction rating system that is to be trusted requires transparency and knowing how many responses (n) were utilized to produce the rating. In this case we know neither. -2 points for the BBB.

You’re only as credible as your reputation allows you. I will readily admit my perceptions here are tainted by the numerous phone calls I got when I first started Inavero from someone at the BBB trying to convince me that if I didn’t invest in accreditation, I was going to lose out on a big contract. The salesperson badgered me repeatedly, telling me they had received requests from a large company for information on us and that they were showing negative information until I paid for their accreditation. I had been in business for 6 months, started in an extended hallway in my house – it is safe to assume that if there was a large company considering doing business with us – I would have known. It turns out I’m not the only one with that complaint. One story is written here. And another here. A simple Google search and you’ll come up with dozens more. My point is this – if you don’t trust the source – how can you trust the outcome. -1 point for the BBB.

Quick math should net you a score (in my opinion) of -2. Said another way, I am certainly not a promoter. As of today, our business isn’t ranked on their site (but many of yours are – check it out). That’s a relief. We garnered an NPS of over 70% and an average score of 9.2 out of 10 from our clients. You wouldn’t think I’d be worried. Yet, lack of trust + lack of transparency = uneasiness in my book.