Sage Blog

Having worked at Sage for over two years now, I’m acutely aware of the importance of culture, and also the physical environment I work in.

Admittedly, in previous roles before I joined Sage, I had an assumption that culture was an abstract ingredient that just existed. If there was any attempt to shape culture, it was usually handed down from senior people in the business, who tended to be very far away from me personally.

Probably not the best conditions to ensure success I’m sure you’ll agree.

An innovative approach to business

Something that is very clear from working at Sage, is that there is a very ‘flat’ structure to our culture. In other words, everyone from the CEO, to executives, to support lines and sales will afford you the time and opportunity to voice your ideas and contribute. The result is that ideas can come from anywhere, and this leads to a truly innovative approach to business, particularly important in a technology company.

Accountability

A culture like this doesn’t happen overnight though. It is bred over time, by empowering people, and giving them accountability. This is the hallmark of a business with a strong culture. However the intangible aspects (behaviours, impulses and decisions) are only part of the story.

A prevalent trend at the moment is to brand office spaces with the desired characteristics for employees to exhibit. This is something we’ve recently undertaken in Sage Accountants’ Division.

Aside from communicating desired behaviours, branding office space can also influence processes and how we communicate. For example, communal areas where people can talk mean that business can be conducted in a calm and relaxed manner. TV screens on each floor allow us to instantly feedback comments from our customers.

Innovative offices

A great example of a branded office space is Google offices, particularly the Googleplex in California. Walls are painted with bright primary colours reflecting the Google logo and fun, vibrant brand. Live searches that are being conducted around the world are beamed straight into the communal areas, highlighting global trends, and informing product development. There’s even a slide and a fireman’s poll! Evidence if any were needed that Google is a fun and innovative place to work. This also reflects a culture of innovation, where developers spend 30% of their time working on anything they like. Complete responsibility and accountability in action, and this results in a constant stream of new products like Gmail, Chrome, Wave and Circles. Granted, not all of them have been a resounding success, but they are prime examples of a brave and innovative approach to business.

Boosting creativity

You might not have Google’s budget but here are a few cheap and cheerful things you could do in your office to boost creativity:

• Always focus on the desired characteristics of the brand – Are you repositioning the brand, or simply maintaining what you already exhibit? This should form the essence of the branding in your office space.
• Involve your employees – There will be certain degree of control needed, but always ensure that you encourage content and ideas from your employees. It’s where they will be working after all.
• Refresh your content – Try and stay on top of refreshing the messaging in your office. Strategic plans have defined stages, so ensure you have the right message at the right time.
• Be brave and innovative – It’s not just customers who like innovation, employees thrive on it too. Try and incorporate original ideas and media into your office. It’ll get high levels of engagement.”

What is clear from all of these activities is that they are the starting point for delivering exceptional customer service. If you focus on and take care of your staff, they will be in the best position possible to offer customers superior service, and also extoll the virtues of the brand.

Having empowered our staff in Accountants’ Division, we’re starting to see results, like winning the Customer Service Training Award this year, and also signing up our 10,000^th Sage Accountants’ Club member, so long may this process continue.

Daniel Duran, Sage Accountants’ Team

This month’s topic on HR Vision explores ‘The Ideas Economy’.

Sian Harrington debates the issue of the transition towards an ideas based economy, and the need to create a culture of innovation within an organisation.

But what is innovation and how can a business utilise it? What does an innovation culture look like? Will creating an innovation culture require greater investment from HR? And can technology help make innovation happen?

Here are Sage HR & Payroll’s top tips on creating a culture of innovation:

1. To be innovative, you need to support innovation

For businesses looking to their people to generate ideas to give them the competitive advantage, they must make sure their company fully support the ideas process. For an employee to show innovation they must first feel empowered to think differently within their role.

HR is central to driving empowerment initiatives in an organisation. Start by giving individuals greater accountability for what they do and provide regular opportunities for them to be involved in a wider range of work.

2. Cultivate the appropriate working environment

For innovation to thrive HR must take charge of creating the appropriate working environment. This means moving away from hierarchical structures which sees employees working in constrained roles, to more delayered structures that give people the option to work across departmental project teams.

Having a flatter structure will provide greater openings for cross-departmental collaboration and give people the flexibility and freedom they need to develop ideas. Encourage offsite working for both individuals and teams and consider the technologies needed to facilitate collaboration across the board.

3. Reward and recognition

It may sound obvious but people are more inclined to do what they are actually rewarded or motivated to do. If a business emphasis is cost-cutting and streamlining processes then people will not be inclined to develop new initiatives, whereas a business with an incentive scheme based around innovation will encourage creative thinking as part of day-to-day practice.

Create a clear reward and recognition policy to motivate your employees and recognise individuals or teams who have been involved in new projects – even if they’re deemed unsuccessful.

4. Lead by example

Although HR will drive empowerment initiatives, management also need to take accountability for energising the workforce. They must take an active role in supporting and sharing new ideas and align employees to a shared vision.

Ensure your leadership team promote business wide collaboration, listen to new ideas and actually embrace change with your organisation. Your leadership team need to champion experimentation through coaching and mentoring, and be prepared for smart risk taking, as with every opportunity, there is a chance of failure.

5. Removing obstacles

Many organisations struggle to develop an innovation ethos mostly due to cultural barriers or process-driven hurdles. Often a fear of being punished for failure, barriers preventing collaboration or a lack of appropriate infrastructure for learning and sharing can impede innovation.

HR must take responsibly to uncover obstacles and pioneer change across the board. Simple tools like an ideas board on your company intranet can help learning and sharing, whilst applying a non-judgemental approach to all ideas and actively embracing the risk of failure will help shift culture barriers.

6. Practical processes

It’s all very well encouraging lots of new ideas but what are people meant to do if they’ve had one.  A clear process for capturing ideas and helping to turn them into practical solutions is vital – an innovation culture requires that people believe that their ideas will be listened to.

Implementing an online forum where employees can post new ideas provides a platform for developing concepts across an organisation. Line managers can also encourage the ideas process by holding regular discussion groups and brainstorming sessions.

7. Turning ideas into reality

Businesses need to provide the appropriate resources to ensure that good ideas have the chance of becoming innovative solutions. It is important to recognise the negative impact it may have if a lack of resource or organisational barriers mean ideas cannot be taken forward.

Having a flatter structure will make your organisation more adaptable to new projects, allowing for employees to attach themselves to different projects or work in secondments or job rotation roles.  Allocating time away from the day job will encourage employees to develop ideas, whether working individually or in teams. Encourage secondments and job rotation

8. Time

It is important to recognise that cultural changes will not happen overnight and in particular nurturing innovation rather than an operational way of thinking will require dedicated time and resource.

An innovation culture can easily become the ‘latest HR fad’ if it is not managed with clear objectives or a consistent approach.

9. Measuring innovation

It can be challenging to measure exactly how innovation has impacted your business and not every new idea will have clear tangible results connected to it, but attaching measurements will make rewarding employees, board-level buy-in and strengthening the innovation culture easier.

Innovation metrics should be tied in to your business or departmental strategic goals and consider individual or collaboration successes, resources or delivery timescales. Remember it may be significant periods of time before clear financial results are seen but this doesn’t make the project any less successful.

10. Celebrate success

Celebrate! Innovative organisations are places where people enjoy their peers’ work. So make sure your business encourages teams and departments to regularly share their successes and milestones achieved. Celebrating and sharing these events, both large and small is part of creating the innovation culture.

Why not encourage managers to organise offsite days to give individuals and departments the opportunity to talk about and present their work to others across the business?

Katie Slater, Sage HR and Payroll Team

When we originally sat down to discuss the Top Tips guide for businesses, back on a cold and rainy afternoon in Newcastle (some say just a typical summer’s day), we wanted to give our customers something really useful, something different and most of all something positive.

100 Top Tips guide

Several coffees later we made a decision. Who better to provide business advice than our customers? And so the Moving Forward…100 Top Tips guide was born.

Top tips for businesses, from businesses

[A couple of people have had problems downloading the guide. If you're one of them then please email me I'll send you a copy. Cath - catherine.sheldon@sage.com]

When you download the 100 top tips guide you’ll get a collection of business tips from some of our 800,000 customers. A rather handy reference guide for all types of businesses. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

And for our customers that sent us their business advice? Well, they get to promote their business, show off their knowledge, and be one of five possible winners of an iPad. Not bad.

Within hours of asking our customers to share their tips they started to pour in.  In fact, we received everything from the down right wacky (you know who you are) to the fresh and innovative. Of course, quite a few of our customers said their top tip was to use Sage business software…so thanks for that

Some of my favourite top business tips

Tip 6

“Invest in your employees. A happy workforce is a productive workforce. Staff need to be kept motivated. Clearly define their role in the business and make them feel part of a team.”

Susan Nisar, Swimshop

www.swimshop.co.uk

Tip 53

“Your existing clients are your best source of referred business, a great Customer Relationship Management system will keep you in touch and strengthen the relationship. Always ask clients for feedback, positive feedback makes a great testimonial and negative feedback should create your action plan.”

Grahame Johnson, Opus Accounting Ltd

www.opusaccounting.co.uk

Thanks Grahame. Being Sage we’d obviously recommend our CRM software ACT! by Sage for that one.

Tip 95

“Keep spirits up, the best sales people are not the ones who get all the deals, but the people who can pick themselves up and carry on when things fall down.”

James Esom, Patchsave Ltd

www.patchsave.com

A big thank you

Thanks to all our customers and businesses who took part. You’ve helped to create an essential collection of business and advice and tips. We had a great time creating this guide and it was clear from day one that  people were more than happy to share their advice with us and others.

Congratulations to our five lucky winners; I’m sure you’re enjoying your new iPads.

Your free business top tips guide

We hope you find our 100 Top Tips guide useful. We’d love to hear from you, so let us know what you think.

Andy Atkinson, Sage Small Business Division

David Beard, Sage CRM Expert

In all economic conditions, businesses think about WHAT they sell – their top products, consistent buyers, etc. However, thinking this way is really just “navel gazing” – only operating from an internal perspective.  A better question to ask is WHY customers buy, HOW they do this, WHAT their expectations are of a sale, and more. In essence, you need to think creatively, albeit Inside the Box of your chosen business environment.

OK – sounds like beginner’s Business Strategy, right?

Sure it does.  However, I think the day-to-day reality for many business operators is this – they are stuck with an internal narrative.  Many, when asked WHY they want to a process to work a certain way, just say “it’s what we have always done”.  Critically, there is often no real reference to the CUSTOMER’S experience of the sale. 

How did we end up not thinking from a customer perspective?

After listening to Radio 4’s In Business a few weeks back, I was struck by Russell Ackoff’s comment along the lines of “most managers don’t deal with complexity … they look for simple solutions”  What Mr Ackoff is suggesting is that innovation is hard work.  When you are busy executing & monitoring a business strategy, it’s often hard to step back and think differently.  After a while, usually when the same ideas fail to deliver the same results, the owner is left to contemplate the operating complexity of the real world.

How can people be innovative and run the day-to-day?

Mr Ackoff suggests synthetic thinking is required – studying the behaviour of the parts of a business as it relates to the functions of the whole.   At its most basic, it means mapping your customer’s journey through your  business- where does it cruise uninterrupted, when does it end up in a cul-de-sac, and the like.  And, in most knowledge-based businesses, these journeys are inextricably linked to employee engagement.  The most valuable mapping ideas are tied up in employee’s heads.  They know how that customer journey works – asking them to help improve the journey will shed light on the complex systems within a business. 

That should allow you to drive innovation from within, delivering a clearer view of the world in which your business operates & how best to focus your efforts.

David Beard, Sage CRM Expert

Stuart Lynn, Head of R&D, Sage's Mid Market Division

I was intrigued when reading a story recently which defined the meaning of innovation as the execution of an idea, whereas creativity was having the idea in the first place. Most people I speak to would instinctively lump these two things together and call them innovation. So, I went off to the web to check this out; here I found a number of meanings. A couple that jumped off the page were…

 “Innovation can be described as the result of some amount of time and effort into researching (R) an idea, plus some larger amount of time and effort into developing (D) this idea, plus some very large amount of time and effort into commercialising this idea into a market place with customers”.

Being from an R&D background, this strikes a chord with me as it combines the idea and the delivery, and more importantly it goes further to look at commercialising… I wonder how many companies put all of their effort into the first two parts and forget the last and arguably most important part?  I have to say that I’ve seen this happen on more than one occasion.

Building on this point, I came across another thought provoking statement…

“Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash. Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas.”

How many businesses set out to innovate but end up inventing? How many people remember the £40 million ATP Train innovation or invention? How many businesses really turn ideas into cash? and how many innovations end up costing the company a small fortune?

A few weeks back, I was watching this youtube video posted by Dennis Howlett, It’s a chap called R “Ray” Wang presenting how a major software vendor had failed to commercialise some great ideas.

Why does this happen? Did they get it wrong from a customer perspective? Did they work with customers to see if the original ideas were valued before they went on to deliver them? Did they fail to commercialise them? Do the company see this as a failure? Or was it actually a ‘share of voice’ Marketing and PR success despite the ideas not being widely adopted? Plenty of food for thought, and only the vendor themselves will know the answers.

Is the secret behind innovating to ask customers what they want before you start?

Controversially, I would have to say no to this question, well not entirely anyway… Whilst, I would advocate speaking to customers at all times and involving them through the process to add value, you can’t always rely on customers as your only source of “innovative ideas”. What’s more the customer will most likely be focused on today’s issues as opposed to looking for step change innovation. Henry Ford’s classic quote sums this up nicely…

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.”

To be really successful in business I believe you have to continually innovate and generate new ideas, not by relying solely on customers to tell you what they want, but by understanding how your customers work, what they need today, and where they are headed in the future.

In my experience the best and most successful innovations are the ones where you deliver something that the customer didn’t know they needed but can’t live without.  

And what happens when you run out of ideas?

Go visit a bunch of customers!

Follow me on twitter @_Stuartlynn

Written by Stuart Lynn, Head of R&D, Sage Mid Market Division

The Krypton Factor: train your business brain

The second series of the Krypton Factor in association with Sage is ready and waiting to hit our TV screens on 5 January 2010. So to get us all in the mood to use our brains (what… this close to Xmas?) our bosses have ordered a box of Krypton Factor games and goodies.

But, rather than pass them off as Christmas gifts to our friends and family we’d thought we’d give our beloved blog audience a chance to win them, then maybe you can pass them off as Christmas gifts instead

We’ve got a Krypton Factor IQ test, a set of Krypton Factor Quiz cards or a Krypton Factor meltdown electronic game up for grabs.

And what do you need to do to win such riches?

Just add a comment to this post telling us your most laugh out loud Christmas party stories. We’ll enjoy a good giggle and announce the winners right here on the blog on Monday 21 December (so remember to check back). Remember, we’ll be publishing your comments, so don’t tell us anything you’d prefer Santa didn’t know.

A word from our legal team:

Our legal team tells us that all good things have conditions attached (or something like that) and this competition is no different. By sharing your story with us, you are telling us that you are happy with these rules and want to be entered into the competition to win one of the following great prizes: a Krypton Factor IQ test, a set of Krypton Factor Quiz cards or a Krypton Factor meltdown electronic game. If you win we are sure you will want to shout the good news from the rooftops so you won’t mind that we will publish your anecdote as well as your name and the fact that you have won the competition. 

We want to remind you that your entry might be published so please don’t include anything that you would not want sharing with the world (and your boss) and anyway, we’ll exclude any entry which we feel oversteps the mark. The closing date for entries is Friday 18 December 2009 and you may only be entered into the draw once (no matter how many funny stories you tell us). 

The competition is only open to those aged 18 or over who are based in the UK (sorry to the rest of the world – your time will come). No Sage employees (or their families) may enter. This competition is intended as good free harmless fun, but if you have an issue with it, just let us know and we’ll see if we can help. This kind of help is as far as we go though – no financial liability applies. Finally, good luck!

Day release to London

Well, it was an exciting start to the week yesterday for a few of us from Sage in Newcastle, as we took a trip to London to attend The Pitch Grand Final 2009. Organised by Sift Media and the brain child of Dan Martin, it’s been a search to find the UK’s most exciting and innovative small companies.

So, who are the most exciting small companies?

The final of The Pitch

Businesses that were successful in 6 regional heats were given the opportunity to ‘Pitch’ their business to a well known panel including Apprentice winner Tim Campbell and self made millionaire Charlie Mullins of Pimlico Plumbers. After an excellent pitch, the overall winner and congratulations went to Anthony Lau of Cyclehoop who walked away with a prize of £50,000 worth of business goods and services. His Cyclehoop is a simple but highly effective invention that has opened up a potentially huge market in the UK alone.

The wider effect

Although the day was ultimately to find a winner, I was just as impressed by everyone that attended and the fact that great events like this are around for us all to support the start up community who will ultimately shape the future of UK businesses. We were demonstrating our free Sage Planning for Business and our simple accountancy software Sage Invoicing but in all honesty we got as much out of just hearing about what people were doing and planning – an inspiration to us all and great customer interaction!

Inspiration for us all

So on a day full of inspiring stories all round it was fantastic to see such enthusiasm out there from businesses ready and willing to start off on a new business journey… especially given the current effects of a recession. Ultimately it’s people, enthusiasm and support like this that will help to move us out of recession.

 So, who do you think are the UK’s most exciting small companies?

Written by Geoff Phillips, Marketing Manager