With the World Cup upon us, words like ‘team spirit’, ‘gees’, ‘attitude’, ‘motivation’ and ‘passion’ are often heard. The general consensus is that a happy team with great team spirit is often a winning team. In fact, team spirit is often the only differentiator between two teams. In my mind, it is no different in the business world. Team spirit is derived from the culture in a team or organisation.

The competitive business world is like a war zone. Companies are trying to outsmart each other all the time, in order to gain sustainable competitive advantages. Most often, business leaders focus on strategies around product design and innovation, service delivery, or price to find the competitive edge. Brand positioning and advertising in focused distribution channels, and innovative ways of establishing sales opportunities, are other popular battle grounds. Far too seldom, however, the role and potential value of a strong corporate culture (or ‘team spirit’) is recognised as an integral part of a successful arsenal. In my view, a strong corporate culture not only lends itself to a competitive advantage, but the fact that it is particularly difficult to copy gives it its immense sustainability.

The logic is very simple: happy people perform better. The aim, therefore, is to create a work environment where people are happy. The challenge, however, is how to achieve that. In my experience, the starting point is to build a culture around a set of core values, not rules. Given the immense diversity of our rainbow nation, the next challenge is to find core values that are common to all religions, languages and ethnic backgrounds. If successful, this then has the added advantage of galvanising the troops into a strong, loyal unit. Once the set of core values have been discovered, the next challenge is to get individual ‘buy in’ from every member of the team, and once that is achieved, to keep it alive and strong. It is important that everyone understands that there is no hierarchy when it comes to values, and the only way to ensure that it remains a powerful force is if every single team member accepts accountability to act as a co-custodian of the values driven culture.

At MiWay, we build our culture around four simple values, namely freedom, attitude, energy and accountability. As CEO, I spend two hours with every new intake of staff, which happens every month, to ensure they become co-custodians of our values. Our management team ensures that all communication to staff is done in the context of the four values. Lastly, we have a weekly floating trophy, a samurai sword that goes to the individual who set the best example of living up to the values in the preceding week. At the end of the year, we have different ways of honouring and rewarding all the weekly winners. The passion and excitement surrounding the nomination process, and the prestige associated with receiving the award, leave me in no doubt our values driven culture is well and alive and giving us a sustainable competitive advantage in the market.

At MiWay, we are one big team. We battle together and we have fun together. We enjoy each other’s company. Often, this feeling of togetherness helps us to overcome tough challenges. Our corporate culture creates the environment for us to be competitive and successful in the ultra-competitive business world…..it often gives us the edge to win the battle. Most importantly, it ensures that we are having fun in the process.

Kind regards,

To invite clients to post comments – positive or negative – on our website, took more than just a huge dose of courage. We were potentially opening ourselves up for massive reputational damage. If we delivered consistently poor service, and all the comments were negative, it could have done more harm than good. It could have exposed us as inept, hopeless, below par.

On the positive side, however, it would portray us as transparent and truly committed to customer satisfaction and awesome service levels. It would encourage clients to trust us, because we were not trying to sweep our blunders under the carpet. It would also improve channels of communication between us and our clients. Lastly, it would highlight problem areas such as bottlenecks, to which management could react swiftly. In short, it would portray us as honest and refreshing.

Above all else, it would make us the first company in SA (as far as we could establish) to do this.

Act of courage
We decided to take the plunge and do it. We were prepared to live with the risk of malicious people abusing the forum to harm us. We decided to place everything, no matter how scathingly negative it might have been. The only exceptions are blasphemy, hate speech, racism and banalities.

Great result
It turned out to be an absolute winner. We immediately became aware of problem areas. All new businesses have growing pains; the comments forum enabled us to effectively deal with our growing pains much quicker.

The split between compliments and complaints is roughly 50/50. This is encouraging, since people complain much easier than give compliments. I believe this initiative is the main reason why we have the highest compliment ratio in the industry on the independent website, hellopeter.com. It keeps us focused and on our toes. Our staff know they have no place to hide, they can’t sweep mistakes under the carpet. They also know if they delight clients, they might be honoured with a compliment that is visible to the whole world. In short, the comments forum has strengthened our service culture.

Challenge
It remains an open question why no-one else does this? Are service companies too scared to see what their clients think of them? Or don’t they really care? Just imagine what it will do to service levels in SA if all service related businesses had comments forums on their websites……

Our pledge
At MiWay, we remain committed to awesome service. We can’t guarantee that we will always get it right the first time, but we will certainly remain transparent and 100% committed to fixing our mistakes. Over time, I believe, our transparent approach will lead to our service levels reaching incomparable heights.

Kind regards,

When the founding members of MiWay sat down to plan and strategise, we realised the importance of offering clients something different. We also realised being different is not good enough; we needed to offer something that is different and better – better value, better service, or better price (lower premiums in insurance terms). A new company that simply offered the same as all the existing ones would have had a very small prospect of success, for the simple reason that it would not have offered consumers a compelling reason to move from their existing service providers.

The essence of business strategy, according to the gurus, is differentiation, as explained above.

The vision for MiWay is to establish a one-stop-shop financial services company, one that offers a wide range of financial services products under one brand. We decided to start with short-term insurance, but the medium to long term plan includes life insurance, investment products, loans, debit/credit cards, asset finance, etc. So, despite our current focus on car insurance, MiWay will eventually offer a lot more.

The challenge that faced us was to find meaningful differentiators in an already competitive short-term insurance industry. This was by no means an easy task. It is easier said than done. However, by listening to the typical gripes of consumers and finding solutions to it, we managed to bring a number of exciting differentiators to market. A number of these differentiators are also quite innovative in their own right. This provided the founding team with a great deal of satisfaction.

The list of differentiators includes the following:

1. A comments forum, where clients are invited to post compliments or complaints on our website.
2. A rewards programme (MiRewards) that is based on client loyalty and not on luck.
3. A portal (MiXpress) that enables online purchasing of products, as well as self service online administration of policies.
4. A motor insurance product (MiDriveStyle) that rates clients according to their own specific driver behaviour.
5. A values-based culture based on four unique core values.

In addition to the above, there are a number of differentiators planned for the future, when we roll out the rest of the financial services products. Differentiation and innovation have become part of the way we look at things, a way of life. In fact, our brand is being built around the concept of ‘coherent logic’, or ‘intelligent by design’. The customer must be able to say MiWay’s services are ‘designed for me’. This, of course, is a journey, not a destination. It implies a certain mindset towards everything we do. It also implies we will forever be in a state of continuous improvement. We will forever be asking ‘how can we do things smarter’?

I plan to place a series of discussions of these differentiators on my blog over the next number of weeks. I would appreciate feedback, comments, debate.

Kind regards,