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A new business approach to be introduced in China
By Chen Qide (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-10-20 14:34

John Fleming, chief scientist of human sigma, hopes more Chinese enterprises will resort to human sigma, a new business approach, to improve their way of managing people.

The Chinese version of the book entitled Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter will be published in November this year to let more Chinese businesses know the new approach, said Jia Jinjie, partner at Gallup in China, today.

"The book is an innovative and research-based approach to putting the people back into businesses, while simultaneously growing value and profits," Jia said.

During the industrial era, value came from labour, a physical effort required to build consumer goods. But in the new economy, the power and the profit lie with the worker, he said.

"The more engaged the knowledge worker is, the more profit he or she is capable of producing," Fleming said.

A Gallup study of over hundreds companies in 2007 showed that companies that built a critical mass of engaged employees and engaged customers grew earnings per share at 2.6 times the rate of low-engagement companies.

"To make the most of the employee-customer encounter and create real value on the new factory floor, companies must learn to measure and manage that experience and the people who create it," he said.

Based on studies of 10 million customers and 10 million employees around the globe, the five-step Human Sigma approach brings excellence to the way employees engage and interact with customers.

The book published by the China Youth Publishing House offers a first-of-its-kind method to measure and improve employee and customer experiences and make them scalable across large and complex organizations.

Each of the 10 companies and 1,979 business units in the financial services, professional services, retail and sales industries that has applied Human Sigma management principles has outperformed its five largest peers during a recent one-year period by 26 per cent in gross margin and 85 per cent in sales growth.

"Human Sigma will change the way you think about your work, your employees and your customers forever," said Fleming.