The Key to Stay Relevant: How a 360º perspective is crucial to businesses success
Not only outside of our walls, but also within our organisations, staying relevant is key to succeeding in an always changing environment.
Relevance: the degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening or being talked about.
According to this definition of relevance, it is highly related to being useful and playing an important role in the society or group.
Today, listening to a wonderful podcast I listen to twice a week, called “El Podcast de Itnig” (Only in Spanish, sorry), the team were interviewing Thomas Meyer, CEO and Founder of Desigual, who was always keen on making his company relevant.
It caught my attention that during the interview, which lasts almost 2 hours, more times is mentioned the word “Relevance” than “Profitable”, and only after those 2 hours is that I understood that maybe Mr. Meyer talks about relevance because profitability comes along with it.
Now, relevance has several dimensions as no one can be relevant to everyone in the world, reason why you better choose who you want to be relevant to.
From a company perspective, relevance has 4 dimensions, and if you think in the main stakeholders of a company, that makes total sense.
Being relevant to customers
Being relevant to employees
Being relevant to the society
Being relevant to investors
Being relevant to customers
Just think about it for 15 seconds before keeping reading.
No customers = no business, and the game is over. Companies are worth nothing without customers, regardless of who they are.
When someone purchases from you a product or a service, they are somehow asking for a portion of your time, gifting some of their time, and thus they need to be actively listened. This active listening includes understanding how they feel, why they prefer to pay you and not any other company, and which are their expectations. You, as a company should, invest in putting all that together and bring in front of them the best product/service, or at least, what they are asking for.
Being relevant to employees
Similarly to customers, if there are no employees, it’s going to be difficult to deliver a remarkable product/service.
It’s true that many freelance workers around the world have no employees, however, they are technically not a company, and their purposes are somehow different to a company’s.
Most people choose to work for a company due to a combination of compensation and career path, however, most of the times they stay because of the culture and the environment. Make sure your company offers a nice culture, taking care of their well-being, offering them a well structured career path and appraising their achievements, otherwise, and as the job market is so competitive, someone else will give them those treats and they will undoubtedly leave.
Being relevant to the Society
As a company and as individuals, we are part of a worldwide society, however, for whoever wants, we can narrow a bit more that scope, and assure that, at least, we are part of the society of the country from which we operate.
Whether your company is B2C or B2B, it has some responsibilities with their local society, making sure they are a responsible corporate citizen, treating their employees, society and investors in a fair way, not to talk about being respectful with environmental and governance aspects (As social we have already included them here). As the ESG topic is quite hot nowadays, many companies are investing in it from a greenwashing perspective, not making any real changes and thus being not relevant.
Being relevant to investors
Ultimately investors are somehow owners of the company, in a higher or lower stake, and as such, every company should have amongst one of their priorities, being relevant to investors, otherwise, the company will not be getting the maximum out of their investors, which are there to make the company grow with their contributions.
To sum up
As a summary, being relevant requires proactivity, staying on top of changes of all types, including cultural changes, economic changes, social changes … And only the ones who bother the most to listen these 4 stakeholders will win this game, which will be over for all those who only listen to their ego. After these conclusions, I believe Mr. Meyer hit the sweet spot by making sure Desigual stays relevant over 30 decades, as the company has had economic ups and downs, however, they have never stopped being relevant and in everyone’s mind, including their customers, their employees, the society as a whole and their investors.