Manage Your Human Sigma

www.hbr.org

When the Gallup Organization applied Six Sigma principles to sales and service groups at several companies, it learned how much performance variation exists between seemingly similar work groups. Managing that variability can raise overall performance by orders of magnitude and can create organic growth.

Manage Your Human Sigma

by John H. Fleming, Curt Coffman, and James K. Harter

With compliments of

Reprint R0507J

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Yet it’s essential that organizations learn to measure and manage quality in all kinds of business settings. In manufacturing, value is created on the factory floor. In sales and service organizations, and in many professional service firms, value is created when an employee interacts with a customer. Indeed, the employee-customer encounter is the factory floor of sales and services. If these organizations are going to achieve meaningful operational and financial improvements, the employee-customer encounter must be managed with great care. Quality improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma are extremely useful in manufacturing contexts, where ingredients with predictable properties are repeatedly combined in the same ways, but they’re less useful when it comes to the employee-customer encounter, with its volatile human dimensions. To address this problem of fit, we’ve developed a quality improvement approach that we call Human Sigma. Like Six Sigma, Human Sigma focuses on reducing variability and improving performance. But while Six Sigma applies to processes, systems, and

• To improve the quality of the employee-customer interaction, organizations must conduct both short-term, transactional interventions (such as coaching) and longterm, transformational ones (such as changing the processes for hiring and promotion). In addition, the company’s organizational structure often must be adjusted so that the employee-customer encounter can be managed holistically....