Santiago Mayagoitia on Aligning your Teams with Customer Needs

In a recent podcast conversation with Santiago Mayagoitia, a Lean Six Sigma expert working out of Guadalajara, Mexico, we talked about the critical role of leveraging the power, and tapping into the potential of an organization’s human capital.

Santiago, who has worked extensively with McDonalds, was quick to point out the immense cost of attrition and turnover. He was able to see incredible changes in performance based on mitigating that turnover and getting employees more involved in the operation. “What do you need to do,” according to Santiago, “is not rocket science. You need to have much more focus on the culture. The key point to being more productive is to actually involve people, training them and believing them.”

Providing employees a broader view of operations, and specifically the customer, creates alignment. That alignment drives not only customer satisfaction, but also employee engagement, and productivity enhancements. If employees are aligned with customer needs, then the employee activities will be focused on what matters.

“Take advantage of the human resources that they need to be a line of what the customer needs. Because if there is something that the customer did not read, then it’s totally a some some some waste there. “

Although we may sometimes refer to certain team members as ‘back office’ or ‘not customer-facing’, these individuals are a critical component of delivering value to the customer and need to be in tune with customer needs. They need to understand how they provide value to the customer. That will define success.

The company of tomorrow, the one that will lead in the future, is the one that understands the customer and uses their human resources to be aligned on on that, and makes sure that the activities that each one of their elements doing a daily basis are aligned.

About Santiago Mayagoitia:

Santiago has recently been recognized as a leader in the field of operational excellence and industrial engineering by several professional and academic institutions in Jalisco, Mexico. He has over 12 years of experience in creating and implementing operational excellence programs for regional and international companies, Santiago is a sought after expert, as well as a Master Black Belt, PMP, CSM, and MBA. He has worked with global companies such as McDonalds, Microsoft, Levis, Intel, and CITI. Santiago also co-authored the book “El cubo de la mejora continua” (“The Cube of Continuous Improvement”) which focuses on techniques that increase productivity in SMEs.