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A Personal Focus Produces Amazing Results
When face-to-face with customers, it’s easy to remember the personal aspect of your job. You feel good about helping people and you do it well. However, for tasks that shift from personal to data driven, like reading a chart, it can be easy to forget about the person behind the data. This not only can affect employee motivation, but can also result in missed findings and performance issues.
The Research Study
“To Sell is Human,” a book by Daniel Pink, references a study by an Israeli radiologist, Yeonatan Turner. Turner took notice of the highly-skilled doctors who spent most of their days reviewing MRI scans and X-rays and wondered if that had an impact on their interest at work and more importantly, their performance.
With their permission, Turner took pictures of 300 patients who were having CT scans and X-rays. He enlisted the help of radiologists to review the scans. When they pulled up the scans on their computers, the patient’s picture was also displayed. The radiologists completed a survey after their review and according to Pink, “All of them reported feeling more empathy to the patients after seeing the photograph, and being more meticulous in the way they examined the scan.”
It was a positive sign that the radiologists felt moved to their best work, but Turner wondered if they actually performed better. 3 months after the initial study, he gave the same radiologists 81 of the original scans; this time without a photo of the patient.
The results were astonishing. 80% of incidental findings were not reported. This suggests that without the personal connection, there is less scrutiny with the task at hand.
Turner concluded, “Our study emphasizes approaching the patient as a human being and not as an anonymous case study.”
What to Take Away
Within your organization, ensure that all employees have some sort of personal connection to the customer. This could include sharing positive stories of the team’s results regarding customer service. Finding a way to make it personal is good for everyone.
