[MUSIC] HR already has numerous processes, so think of all the HR processes, from attracting talent, interviewing when we hire. When you think of developing, or even the induction program before that when you arrive at your first day at work. How does this look and feel like? You can think of how you're rewarded, skills based training, attitudinal training, maybe exiting, putting you in different types of jobs. All of these are existing HR practices. HR also has their own codes, and we talked about that last module, where you might have your leadership model, your competency framework. Some of you might have an employee value proposition where we're not making a promise to the customers, but we're making a promise to the employees. Now all of those can be on-brand in practice, at least this is my experience, they're typically off-brand in the sense that they're absolutely generic. A lot of companies are trying to build great places to work in the generic sense. So maybe sort of flexible hours, benefits, all kinds of things that you might offer. But if we actually look at each of these processes, we can think about aligning them with the brand. So think about for example, the promise, the freedom to fly to the customers. It took them a while, but they then codified that internally and called it Freedom Starts with Me. They had to make sure that the employee was equally free, and they went to aspects such as their retirement benefits. They had to make them flexible, that you could choose, maybe even when you would retire. And they of course did this in a very Southwest way, with a lot of humor, and a lot of laughter. Southwest, when we go back to this idea of alignment and leadership and the 3B alignment we talked about last module. They also have three very distinct cultural values. Now if you think about your own cultural values, they're probably pretty similar, as we discussed last time. Something about honesty, integrity, maybe quality of professionalism, and maybe about entrepreneurship or innovation. Southwest's are quite different. One is called the warrior spirit, and this is really the early days of survival, working hard. We're serious about having fun is one of their internal taglines. And that's all about basically, the efficiency,the cheap aspect. Can we get the numbers? Can we survive in this environment? And then, they have two other values. One is a Servant's Heart and the other one is Fun Loving Attitude. Now you probably haven't heard values as unusual as this, but you can see how the values are linked to the brand promise. And that's why we talked about this alignment of our different codes our brand promise, our employee promise, the values that support them. And this really goes along the three B model. But moving toward some of the practices, for example, we said well how do you attract people like David, who does this funny rapping announcement? Well, it starts by getting the right people in the first place. It then continues to getting them right or righter, if you want. So, think about traditional recruitment ads in the paper. Or on the web they're typically skills-based. They look at the kind of skills they're looking for, they list those skills, and if there are pictures associated they usually have young, dynamic and diverse people. But they're not really on-brand, they all look the same, at least to me. Southwest is quite different. There ads are quite humorous, so take a look at this one, this is from quite a while ago. It's a drawing of a dinosaur, and you saw this kid drew these crazy colors all over it and the teacher wrote a note. Brain please try to color inside the lines. And then the text says, Brian shows an early aptitude for working at Southwest Airlines. We're looking for crazy people, is basically what the ad says. It also says there, we're looking for people who have the right attitude, who like to have fun, and it says professionals need not apply, why? While Southwest has figured it is much harder to develop the right attitude than to develop the right skills. So we might as well hire the right attitude and develop the skills in house rather than the other way around. So, if we get the attention of these people, well, people know what Southwest is like, we still have to now Sort through them as they apply. They have about a hundred times as many applicants for a job opening. So they have to be quite efficient at sorting through these applicants. And for many applicants, they don't realize but the interview starts from interview starts. It starts when they enter the building. The receptionist will rate them based on whether they were friendly or not. They might even be observed in the waiting room as you're waiting. Are you chatting to other people? Are you a people person, or do you have your earplugs in? You're working on your iPhone, and you're really not a people person, why? It doesn't make you a bad person, it just the chances that you're going to be friendly with and cheerful with our guests on the plane are quite low if you don't have that natural tendency. They might have you present something to a group of applicants. They typically interview in groups, now, they're watching you. Are you funny when you're presenting? Are you natural when you're presenting? But they're also watching the audience. Are you watching these people, rolling your eyes when they say something silly? Which means you don't really have empathy, or you're those kind of people who are nodding and saying, it's okay, I've been there, I know this is tough. And they're supporting the people who are presenting in front of the other applicants. Personally having taught for over 20 years, these are the students I get positive energy from. The ones that are constantly nodding, it's a difficult job to do. And you get positive energy from them. Those are the people South West wants. They even do this with the pilots. So they have pilots applying groups. And very early on, this is in 1970s. They asked them, you know usually a young employee would say, put on these Bermuda shorts, crazy colorful shorts. And a lot of the pilots they showed up in their suit and tie and they were wondering, why should I do this. And she'd quickly say, you don't have to. But if you didn't do that, the chances of being hired were quite low. Why? Well, if you're not at ease with yourself, if you're too serious to put on a pair of bermuda shorts, chances are you have that kind of attitude, that kind of personality. And being the captain of the ship your behavior, even though you might not be interacting with the guests, also effects the other employees. So your safety checks might be a bit more uptight. The expectations might be a bit higher. And as a result the flight attendants might not be as natural as easy going with the people. So, you can see how that one part of the people process is hugely important. During these interviews, you've got people from Southwest with seven Point checklist, rating their applicants on all kinds of their dimensions that are very, very hard to fake. You know if you're naturally this way you can perform well, if you're not it's going to be pretty hard to pass muster. Now each and every aspect of their HR processes has been fine-tuned to deliver the brand, to make and reward people for being more cheerful. They might celebrate people who've been particularly helpful to one another, who've been cheerful. They, if you look at their announcement for jobs on the web today you'll see they are looking for people who are friendly, who do things well with laughter, and fun you will see even the way they communicate to, let's say their investors. Their annual reports might be quite funny. Where they're celebrating love in their annual reports. In their newsletters you'll see the president on Valentine's Day Declaring her love at this point, it was Colleen Barret. She'd been in customer relations for 13 years prior to the employees and the customers. That goes back to the leadership, but you lead by example, it's part of the people process in that sense. Let me pick out a couple of other ones to highlight this point. One of the distinguishing aspects in terms of organizational structure of Southwest is the fact that they have a culture committee. They have a committee that's focused squarely on maintaining the Southwest culture. Now, this committee came about as Southwest was growing at a fast pace. And they realize that they're growing faster that the culture could keep up with the growth. And they knew in the short term they would generate profits. But in the long term if the people weren't there to support their brand, the brand Brand would collapse on itself. So maintaining the culture was critically important. And the CO at that point, Herb Keller really talked about culture being the competitive advantage. That SouthWest was able to have over time. So, they have this culture committee which because so successful that they also expanded this to the vendors they worked with. They had to go through certain aspects of their induction program so that the companies working with SouthWest would also feed into this culture, which then, of course Delivered on those behaviors. They also realized, like many companies do, that sort of middle managers, or your direct manager has a huge impact on your attitude, your behavior, so these managers, at one point, were put through a three month training program called Quest. And every two years they have to go through a program called Request. which is really about making sure they live the culture at Southwest and that they have that kind of an atmosphere in their team that they guide. And finally, and I rarely see this in cases of a merger, they had a merger with Morse Air, and for many mergers companies look at merging their systems, their processes, they look at their financial due diligence. They rarely do the culture due diligence and they often don't pay much attention to the cultural integration, at least not in the early days. This is despite that many mergers fail and most of them because of culture clash. So for Southwest, this was actually very, very important to get right And this was at the beginning of the whole merger process, and so culture and culture adaptation was very important. They didn't have the chance to hire those Morris Air employees through their rigorous hiring program, but they worked very hard to integrate them as seamlessly with the culture. So, where did all that lead us? The seven stages, what kind of measures do we use? Even those by the way, the financial measures, they have some very funny numbers. At least at some point, one I believe was called Nick for net income. One was called Marge for margin. So, even kind of the metrics they had internally were kind of fun and cheerful. But if you think about some of the results, this is a company holistically which lives the brand in terms of cheap and cheerful. They not only win some of the major award in customer satisfaction, they're also seen as one of the leading companies in terms of being friendly with their investors. They also deliver on being on time, not losing baggage, which of course all leads to cheap and other aspects lead to cheerful. So, in the handouts you'll get a whole list of their recent awards over time. They're one of the most desirable places to work for in America. And so when you are brand led from the inside out, you can see and measure the effects in multiple ways. So this was really about this aspect of well how do I think about my processes and my practices, brand practices. And I think Southwest really demonstrated this well. Not just with HR, operations, all our processes can be and maybe should be fine-tuned to deliver the brand. In the remainder of this module, we're going to go from the organizational level, to the individual level. For many of us, and for many of you It's not so much about creating a company from the ground, hiring the right people in the first place, it's about changing course or maybe improving on the delivery of the brand. So it's really about how can I engage at an individual level by various Constituencies, those who already believe in the brand, those who are a bit skeptical, or even they're agnostic, they don't care much. How do I convert them and critically, how do I then create the right habits, or change existing habits, so that we better deliver the brand at those moments that matter? That's a challenge, it's been a challenge for culture change. Or in the culture change literature for a long time, here we're adapting it to branding and really putting at the core of branding and brand building. [MUSIC]
