Key Points

• The voice of the business is one of many voices any organization needs to pay attention to.
• VOB are the concerns and expectations of the organization.
• Striking a fine balance between all voices can see greater overall success in an organization.

What is the voice of the business?

A business must listen and respond to a multitude of different voices. In this article, we will discuss the voice of the business or VOB, what it means, how to gather it, how it will benefit your organization, and how it can be used to balance the other voices you must listen to.

Overview: What is the Voice of the Business, or VOB? 

In any organization, several voices guide you to help you manage your business. You have: 

• The voice of the customer (VOC), expresses the needs, wants, and expectations that your customer has for your business. 
• The voice of the process (VOP) details how well your process is doing in meeting specifications, targets, or goals. 
• The voice of the employee (VOE) expresses the needs, wants, and expectations of the people who work for your organization.
• Finally, you have the voice of the business, or VOB, which defines the needs, wants, and expectations of the business owners, stockholders, stakeholders, and others who concern themselves with the long-term success and viability of your organization.

The problem is that there must be a balance between all the voices since they will often be in conflict. Your VOC may want a perfect, high-quality product.

The VOP tells you you are not capable of delivering that. A VOE says that you need to pay them more for those skills. Your VOB says that without a profit, you might go out of business.

How Voice of the Business Relates to Your Organization

VOB needs and expectations are usually derived from your organization’s financial data. Your stockholder needs might be expressed as dividend growth, a P/E ratio, or an increase in the stock price.

Your senior leadership might be concerned with profits, market share, direct and indirect costs, and return on invested capital. Beyond just financial data, your VOB might want to know about your company’s NPS (net promoter score), customer ratings, and feedback from your employees. 

Once your high-level, macro VOB is understood, you will want to drill down to the underlying processes that support your desired outcomes. That will often be the source of any process improvement activities and team efforts.

At some point, it will be important for you and your organization to overlap your VOB with your VOC, because there will be an intersection where they will likely conflict. It is at that point where senior leadership must decide on how to balance the two conflicting voices.

3 Benefits of Voice of the Business

Your organization must gather, interpret, and properly respond to what you hear from your VOB. By doing so, you will increase the probability of your organization’s future success. 

1. Insight 

By thoroughly gathering and analyzing your VOB, you will gain insight into what the relevant and interested entities expect of your organization. If you don’t have that insight, how can you adjust and adapt to be successful?  

2. Common language 

If everyone is focused on the same issues and has clearly defined them, then everyone in the organization will be aligned and can work in unison rather than at cross purposes. 

3. Balance 

There will be conflicts between your VOB, VOC, VOE, and VOP. One benefit of knowing the specifics of your VOB is that you’ll be better able to achieve balance between the varied groups. 

Why Is the VOB Important to Understand? 

If you can’t measure it, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t fix it. That’s why you need to clearly define and understand your VOB. 

Make Better Data-driven Decisions

You can’t rely on a subjective definition of your VOB. Your VOB needs to be objectively and quantitatively defined so everyone has the same understanding of what your VOB means. 

Orient Your Process

Once your VOB is fully understood, you can then link it to the specific underlying processes you’ll need to improve to allow you to meet the needs, wants, and expectations of your VOB. 

Link Your Efforts

Not only is it important to understand your VOB you also need to have the same level of understanding of your VOC, VOE, and VOP. You will want to look for overlaps and conflicts and eliminate or mitigate them — otherwise, you may jeopardize the future well-being of your organization. 

An Industry Example of VOB

A medium-sized retail company was focused on the voice of its customers. Through a series of surveys and interviews, they gathered information from their customers and felt that they had a good understanding of what the customer wants, needs, and expectations were. They kicked off a high-intensity customer effort and focused all their energies on meeting that VOC.

Three months later, their CFO reported that profits were down, costs were up, product returns were up, and labor overtime was up. It was not a well-received quarterly report.

One senior leader, Mike, who had received some Lean Six Sigma training at a former employer, raised the issue of possible conflicts between the VOC and the VOB. It was not a surprise that the CEO and the rest of the senior leadership had never heard of the concept of VOB.

The CEO charged Mike with the responsibility of developing and executing a plan for capturing the VOB. Once completed, Mike reported back that there were major conflicts with the priorities for the customer and the priorities of the business ownership. Additionally, there appeared to be some capability problems (VOB) to even meet the VOC needs.

With this new insight, the CEO developed and executed a plan to gather and listen to all of the voices and bring balance between them.

Why It Matters

Any organization is going to listen to many voices throughout the creation of any deliverable. While it can seem tempting to hone in on a few, that isn’t a great idea. Striking a good balance between all voices and paying attention to the needs of your organization is crucial.

3 Best Practices When Thinking About VOB

It’s difficult to gather, analyze, and interpret all the business voices including your VOB. Here are a few tips that might help. 

1. Go Beyond the Obvious 

The traditional financial metrics are the ones that you would initially gravitate towards. That’s fine but look beyond those to other metrics that might be customer-focused, employee-focused, and process-focused that should also be part of what you listen to. 

2. Be Quantitative, Not Qualitative

There is considerably less confusion when people talk in terms of numbers and dollars compared to feelings and emotions. Define your VOB in terms of financial or measurable characteristics rather than “I think” or “I feel.” 

3. Don’t Assume 

Don’t rely on assumptions or hearsay. Gather as much data as you can firsthand. Also, consider doing some MSA to gain confidence that you can trust your data.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

VOB isn’t the only useful thing in our Six Sigma toolbox. You might need to supercharge production, and that’s where DPMO comes in handy. Learning how this calculation correlates directly to the quality, waste, and defects of a given production is vital.

Further, you might want to learn about other voices in use throughout Six Sigma. The voice of the customer is important, as without customers businesses don’t have a chance to succeed. Just make sure you’re striking a great balance.

Conclusion

Your voice of the business (VOB) is the wants, needs, and expectations people have of your organization. They are primarily focused on quantitative metrics. Data is defined, gathered, and analyzed to help ascertain what the business needs to focus on to be successful.

However, there are other voices that a business must listen to. You must respond to your VOB and, at the same time, balance the needs of your business with those of your customers, your employees, and the capabilities of your business processes.

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, summed it up beautifully (notes in parentheses are the author’s) in this passage:

Too often we measure everything and understand nothing. The three most important things you need to measure in a business are customer satisfaction (VOC), employee satisfaction (VOE), and cash flow (VOB). If you’re growing customer satisfaction, your global market share is sure to grow, too.

Employee satisfaction gets you productivity, quality, pride, and creativity. And cash flow is the pulse — the key vital sign of a company.