by Brent Budke

In today’s economy and remote working environment, there is much discussion about the need for a fractional workforce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce notes that fractional hiring began in the academic world but then expanded to small start-up businesses that were looking to fill skill gaps. Now it has become just as important in larger companies that can’t afford the loss in business momentum that often coincides with open positions. 

What is a fractional employee?

Fractional employees (or what we refer to as SIVO On Demand Talent) are typically Professionals or Specialists with unique or advanced skillsets, that only work for a set number of hours per week and/or for a finite timeframe. This can be beneficial for the employer as the company only pays an hourly rate for the agreed-upon time per week that the Professional works. Engagements can be 10 to 40 hours per week for a specific timeframe, such as, 2 months, 6 months, or a year. 

This type of engagement can also benefit the fractional professionals who prefer to only commit to working shorter time frames or prefer to divide their time across multiple employers. For instance, a fractional employee might work 2 days a week at one company and 2 days a week at another non-competing company to enjoy a 4-day workweek. Having specialized skills or valuable work experience tends to make fractional professionals attractive to employers who might not need or can’t afford a full time, permanent employee. 

Today’s work environment makes this scenario even more attractive as companies have learned to function with employees working remotely, which gives them a broader pool of fractional professionals to choose from.     

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THREE KEY BENEFITS OF FRACTIONAL EMPLOYEES:

1. Maintain momentum without burning out current employees 

We’ve all experienced the pain of doing your own job and covering for another team member who is taking a needed leave-of-absence or has left the company. It often creates a surge in workload for supervisors or for teammates when the business cannot afford to slow down or pause critical business initiatives.  Open roles can cause remaining team members to be overworked or overwhelmed, leading to mistakes and eventual burn-out. Fractional or temporary employees can be a great solution to keep the business running, to cover temporary openings and to allow the normal hiring process to play out.   

SIVO Note: Hiring fractional insights professionals is even easier if SIVO is already on your company’s “approved vendor” list.  Our first step would be to meet with you to understand your business, key needs, and focus areas.  From there, the SIVO On Demand Talent team will create a personalized approach to match the optimal talent to the business needs to ensure success.

2. Gain immediate expertise - No training necessary 

It can take months to find, hire and train the talent you need to fill open roles.  Hiring fractional employees can help you move forward quickly and right-size your talent, getting a person in place within a week or two vs the months needed for a typical hiring process. Additionally, the beauty of fractional on demand talent is that they have already been vetted and assessed for certain skill sets and expertise, so no training is needed.   Lastly, experienced fractional professionals can bring a fresh perspective and new approaches to your team and projects. 

SIVO Note: SIVO On Demand Talent team leverages our extensive pool of fractional insights professionals with years of experience and expertise across an array of industries such as, CPG, Healthcare, Financial, Technology, Apparel, and Retail.  Whether you need an Insights Associate to execute research projects or an Insights Director to help teams develop strategy and design learning plans, we can match the right talent to your unique needs.

3. Save the company money by focusing on specific business needs 

Because fractional employees are typically classified as contractors for the purposes of payroll and taxes, employers don’t have to deal with costs associated with the hiring process nor the costs of typical benefits, such as health insurance or 401k contributions. That saves the company time and money while still staffing teams with highly qualified professionals. Below is a high-level comparison for fractional Insights Talent vs Full-time Insights employees: 

SIVO Note: The advantage of working with SIVO for fractional insights professionals is that our team has access to a full-service consumer insights agency for ad-hoc resources, tools, and consultation.    

We’d love to talk to you about your needs and how we can match the right talent to quickly make an impact in your business. Please contact us at OnDemandTalent@SIVOInsights.com or visit our website at SIVOInsights.com.

The great resignation took a major toll on businesses across industries in the last few years. Businesses that prided themselves in workplace culture, flexibility, and benefits saw long-time employees step down from their roles. At the same time, more and more companies face transformative restructuring, like acquisitions and mergers. Following such major changes in the world at large and within organizations, the opinions and beliefs held by workers changed tremendously, and even the most forward-thinking businesses have suffered the consequences. 

With that, many businesses are looking for a path toward improving performance and commitment in the workplace. How can they avoid employee attrition in the future? How can they improve their processes to boost efficiency and support employees? How can they redirect leadership to provide the support those employees need? At the end of the day, organizational intelligence gets data-driven insights to answer all these questions, and much more. 

What is Organizational Behavior?

First thing’s first, what is organizational behavior? Organizational behavior is how individuals interact and behave in groups. It’s especially relevant when looking at the workplace. Forward-thinking businesses take their organizational behavior seriously, because it greatly impacts employee satisfaction and engagement, leadership performance, and overall workplace efficiency and effectiveness. If organizations do not understand their employee behavior, perceptions and opinions, they miss out on insights that could holistically improve their business. The best way to get those opinions, and translate them into a strategic action plan is to leverage organizational intelligence solutions.

Leveraging Organizational Intelligence Experts: Gather Unbiased Data

Who should gather organizational behavior data? Your team is full of subject matter experts on your business and your industry, but when it comes to gathering information on organizational behavior, they may not be the right facilitators. Internal teams will have natural bias and may have subconscious results in mind, and could therefore not ask appropriate, unbiased questions. Plus, when it comes to listening to your employees, you want to get thoughts from a wide range of  team members. That means allocating the task to an outside expert, to increase cooperation by maintaining employee confidentiality. Ultimately, this gives every employee the opportunity to provide their opinions, maintaining employee anonymity while removing all potential bias from the initiative.

Keys to Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace

So, what are the keys to improving performance and commitment in the workplace? Understanding what motivates your team members is key to educating and empowering leadership to create a path toward a better future for your company. Get a breakdown on employee insights, leadership development, and strategic planning facilitation below:

• Employee Insights
• Leadership Development
• Strategic Planning Facilitation

Employee Insights

What are the honest opinions of your employees when it comes to your business culture and processes? When leadership asks them directly, they will likely get a much different answer than an unbiased facilitator. However, there are many ways to gather this information from your team. An organizational intelligence expert can identify a custom learning plan based on your business, and implement solutions designed to get the most valuable feedback from employees. According to the Harvard Business Review,

“High-OQ (organizational intelligence) leaders foster an understanding, or ethos, of “who we are.” When leaders move from managing individuals or small groups to leading entire organizations, they need to create a shared understanding of what’s important and what the organization stands for — in other words, an ethos.”

What kind of exercises result in the best employee insights? This varies depending on the organization, but typically it comes down to both qualitative and quantitative research. Some examples of qualitative research include one-on-one interviews, small group employee discussions, and stakeholder interviews. Meanwhile quantitative research looks more like customized online employee engagement surveys targeted to specific employee teams, departments, functions, and regions. Often, employee engagement surveys are administered with regular frequency, e.g., annually or bi-annually, to measure positive or negative changes in employee satisfaction and engagement over time.

Leadership Development

Your industry is constantly changing, your business is growing, and workplace expectations are ever-evolving. Is your leadership adapting to accommodate? Modern businesses must create an expectation for agility in leadership to keep employees engaged and motivated. That means regular leadership training, coaching, and development. Organizational intelligence experts can handle the task and provide tailored, relevant coaching that meets the needs of your leaders. It begins with one-on-one introductory sessions, a 360 degree leadership assessment and follow-up analysis, development planning and coaching sessions with leaders at all levels of the organization - executives, high-potential leaders, and new managers.  This results in more effective leadership and impactful business management that can exceed the expectations of their teams. 

What solutions are involved in leadership development? First, there is leader coaching and education, which can include leadership assessments, feedback, and career planning directly with leaders. This can take place individually or in group/cohort sessions.  There is also team effectiveness training, which helps teams define their purpose, processes, roles and responsibilities, as well as individual contributions. This is especially important for businesses facing restructuring, where new teams are being formed and leadership responsibilities are changing.

Strategic Planning Facilitation

You have so many initiatives in the works – strategic planning can feel like one of those tasks that could easily get pushed down the line. However, strategic planning is the high-level exercise that impacts every other element of your organization. Outsourcing guarantees timely and effective execution, especially when you pick the right partner for the job. Market research firms like SIVO offer comprehensive workshops to ensure your team develops a sound strategic plan that will successfully lead the company into the future.  

These facilitated workshops are especially beneficial to newer businesses or businesses facing large changes, like acquisitions, mergers or a challenging external environment. Knowing how to bring teams together, leveraging critical and inspirational inputs is no small task. That’s why it’s beneficial to have experienced strategic planning facilitators on your side, to plan and facilitate the workshop so that you leave the session with a clearly defined vision, mission, values, plans and ownership assignments. Sessions may also focus on other topics, such as communications planning, insight activation sessions, special-interest group planning, and even competitive SWOT analysis. Regardless of the focus, each strategic planning session will help leaders develop and align on clear strategies for the future, to drive business success.  

Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace

No matter the business, every employee wants to be heard. Creating a place for employees to provide their thoughts can only benefit your business. From an employee perspective, these people-focused exercises prove that leadership cares about their opinions and wants to make steps to improve their workplace experience. The same goes for dedicated strategic planning exercises and leadership development. These initiatives create a stronger, people-first organization positioned to succeed. When leaders are effective, employees are motivated, and business strategy is in place, it all adds up to improved performance and commitment in the workplace – and more success in the market. 

Support Your Business with Organizational Intelligence Services

Organizational intelligence services result in game-changing insights that can transform your business for the better – and position you for even more growth down the line. Your team members have the deep knowledge about the company and industry, and often, their perspectives can unlock opportunities that leadership would have never otherwise considered. Once those insights are relayed to leaders with actionable recommendations, you can accomplish so much more within your organization. 

Are you ready to gain insights on your organizational behavior? Get information on every aspect of your organizational behavior with SIVO. Our team of organizational intelligence experts can help you lead your team through any major transition. We work with organizations across industries, and build custom insight solutions that holistically improve performance and commitment in the workplace. 

Contact SIVO today to discuss your business needs and get support. 

By Cindy Blackstock, CEO and Founder

Customer experience—say it and everyone’s ears perk up. CX is influencing and intersecting with consumer insights across most business sectors: CPG, Retail, Automotive, Financial and Healthcare, to name a few. 

The X Factor

Despite it being a buzz worthy term, there doesn’t seem to be a singular, agreed-upon, industry-wide definition for the term customer experience, affectionately referred to as CX.  Definitions and approaches to CX vary but most just want to know what that “X” factor means for categories, brand, and products.

Here at SIVO, we have our own perspective: 

Customer experience is the customer’s behaviors, perceptions, and feelings about their interactions with an organization, brand, product, or service.

In truth, we have been working to reveal the customer experience all along.  For us, it’s not an intimidating or nebulous concept, because we are quantitative and qualitative research experts who are skilled at understanding people to reveal their truths. Through the optimal combination of quantitative and qualitative research approaches, we get to the “what” by collecting customer experience data, identifying the touchpoints along the customer journey. Then, we get to the “why” behind the customer experience data—the stories, emotions, pain points and delights—and translate it into actionable ideas that businesses can use. The two research approaches go hand in hand with the discipline of CX. 

Data + Stories = A Winning Formula

Many market research vendors try to capture the customer experience primarily through quantitative research techniques. Survey data is essential for quantifying the various paths and touchpoints along the customer journey. It plays an important role in validating the experience, so teams can also measure change over time. But the process can’t stop there. Survey data is necessary but is not a comprehensive measure of the customer’s voice. 

SIVO believes clients need a better blend of data and stories to get the complete picture. It is the human component, in a truly “experiential” in-context setting, that brings the customer experience to life. To make a business impact, organizations need that qualitative, intimate understanding of the experience, to find out what is truly happening during each touch point. In other words, we believe that quantitative research helps identify what to improve, and qualitative research helps identify how to improve the customer experience. 

The Steps to Insights

Your customers are on a journey. There may be many individual stops on the route that make up the overall experience. For example, access may be acceptable, customer service may be satisfying, but there may be positive and negative aspects of the product experience for the user. All these individual touchpoints may net to an acceptable customer experience but may not reveal the nuanced opportunity areas that could lead to an improved experience. Brand teams need to talk to customers and ask, “How are you doing?” instead of, “How are we (the company) doing?” These questions reveal the crucial and detailed human element of CX.

SIVO stiches together a map, an outline of the touchpoints that make up the journey of the entire customer experience. SIVO’s typical approach is 4 Steps: 

With preliminary insights that build team intuition, quantitative survey data to build and validate the journey, followed by qualitative deep dives to uncover the nuanced details, the true customer experience can be revealed. Teams can map customers’ interaction with the brand across each touchpoint, identify opportunity areas to act on and then track the customer experience annually, to ensure the quality of the experience remains positive or improves over time. 

With the journey maps in hand, SIVO’s best practice is to facilitate an Activation Session so that client teams can immerse themselves in the journey and the voices of the customer. A few group discussions and exercises help teams to digest the learning, translate and prioritize into an action plan that can be shared with key stakeholders across the organization.   

To discuss your customer experience research needs with experts from SIVO, please reach out to our team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com. 

By Natasha Weith

Market research is often designed to answer specific business questions, such as how a product compares to the competition or what new features consumers desire. While this information helps guide important business decisions, it does not really help brand teams to truly know their consumer target. To connect with consumers on a deeper level, brand teams must move beyond understanding what is in their consumers’ heads (how they think) and delve into what is in their hearts (how they feel and their underlying motivations.)

The Importance of Empathy

Empathy is the key to unlocking this deeper understanding. It is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It involves not only recognizing what someone else is going through but also being able to emotionally connect with their experience, as if you were in their situation. Empathy fosters compassion, support, and meaningful relationships. 

In a business context, it is about going beyond data points or demographic segments to genuinely connect with consumers’ experiences and feelings. By building empathy, marketers and R&D teams can cultivate a more intuitive grasp of consumer needs, enabling them to make decisions that not only meet consumer expectations but anticipate them. 

Building Consumer Empathy  

Most of the time, marketers are not their own target consumers so they must spend time with them to truly understand their lives, values, hopes, challenges, and behaviors. The goal should be to move through the following spectrum to genuinely empathize with your consumer target. 

The Empathy Trek: Walking in Your Consumer’s Shoes 

Building consumer empathy requires more than traditional research methods. It calls for what we like to refer to as "empathy treks." Unlike typical market research, which is focused on specific business objectives, an empathy trek is a more immersive and observational approach focused solely on getting to know the consumer. The goal is not to gather data for immediate business decisions but to develop a profound understanding of the consumer target. 

An empathy trek involves spending time with your consumers in their natural environments. It means observing how they live, understanding what they value, exploring their beliefs, and witnessing their behaviors firsthand. This exercise helps brand teams to “walk in their shoes” and “feel what they feel,” leading to a more holistic understanding of their lives. 

For example, if your target consumers are busy parents, an empathy trek might involve spending time in their homes during the weekday morning rush, observing how they juggle responsibilities, and understanding the emotional pressures they face. This experience can reveal insights that traditional research might miss, such as the stress points that influence purchase decisions or the small moments of joy that a brand could tap into. 

The Value of Empathy in Brand Management 

So, why is building empathy for your consumer target so critical? The benefits are numerous and can transform the way brand teams approach decision-making. 

1. Eliminating Personal Bias: When brand teams rely solely on data, there is a risk of letting personal biases influence the many decisions made each day. Empathy helps to counteract this by grounding decisions in the lived experiences of consumers, ensuring that strategies and everyday decisions are consumer centric.
2. Faster Decisions: Empathy fosters a more intuitive understanding of consumers. This intuition allows marketers to make faster, more accurate decisions that resonate with consumers on an emotional level, leading to stronger brand connection and loyalty.
3. Anticipating Future Needs: By understanding the emotional drivers behind consumer behavior, brand teams can move beyond simply meeting current needs to anticipating future ones. This proactive approach can set a brand apart in a crowded marketplace.
4. Enhanced Marketing and Innovation: Empathy-driven insights can elevate marketing campaigns by making them more relatable and impactful. They can also inspire innovation, leading to new products and services that not only fulfill a functional need but also resonate emotionally with consumers.
5. Exceptional Customer Service: Finally, empathy can unlock new levels of customer service. When Customer Experience teams truly understand what their customers value and what challenges they face, service strategies can be tailored to address these needs more effectively, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Let SIVO Guide your Path to Consumer-Centric Success 

In a world where consumers are increasingly seeking brands that understand and resonate with their values, building empathy is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity. Brand teams that invest in understanding their consumers at a deeper, more emotional level will be better equipped to create meaningful connections that stand the test of time. 

As an insights partner, it is SIVO’s responsibility to champion empathy with our clients. By advocating for empathy treks and encouraging client teams to walk in the shoes of their consumers, we can help you build brands that not only meet consumer needs but also win their hearts. 

Contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or visit SIVOInsights.com to schedule a discovery call and connect to your consumers!