The Experience Mindset

I’m reading the book, “The Experience Mindset” as part of a departmental book club, and will document my thoughts here as a form of marginalia.

1) “while many companies are clear on the importance of seamless customer experience and its impact on growth, the role employee experience players has yet to be fully qualified or understood. This is often because leaders feel they can only focus on one stakeholder of the other: customers or employees.” - my experience has been that company culture is experiencing similarly by both employees and customers. If company policy really values the experience of one, it values the experience of the other. Disney might be an exception.

Delta might be another - though the focus on showing up as a team for shared safety is a mandate that overrides an “enjoyable” employee experience.

2) Drucker: “in the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts” At one organization, where I was delivering well beyond my job description, my manager spoke to me about “discretionary effort” because I didn’t work long hours. My position was that all of my effort beyond my job description was discretionary - and I could either be accountable to their measure of long hours, or hold myself accountable to working to my potential during normal working hours. They picked option number two and I eventually left due to cultural misalignment. Note that I voluntarily work the hours I need to deliver on project commitments. I will work 50+ hours this week. It’s burning out for the sake of optics that I take issue with. 

Transcription Addiction

Have you ever spent hours upon boring hours transcribing SME content? Don't you wish there was some simple way to turn sound into script?

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2025 Update

• Download the video you want to transcribe into a .wav, .mp4, .m4a, or .mp3 format
• Open the online version of Microsoft 365 Copilot
• Open the online version of Word
• 
  Create a new document
• Find the a microphone icon under the Home toolbar
• Click the dropdown menu for the microphone
• Select "Transcribe"
• Click on the "Upload audio" button and follow the directions to upload your video file
• Once the transcription is complete, click the "Add to document" and select your desired formatting 
  

How is the quality? Well, we've come a LONG way in 16 years...but it's not perfect. However, the biggest downside is that there is a limit on the amount of data you are allowed to upload every month.

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Well, slap your knee and call me your fairy godmother! You can transcribe MP3 and WAV recordings using Microsoft Word! (Actually, my co-worker, Rick Cook discovered how to do this - but I don't think he'd appreciate being called a "fairy godmother.")

Here's how to do it:

• Open Microsoft Word
• Under Tools, click Speech
• Right click the Language bar that appears
• Click Settings
• Choose Speech Recognition under Installed Services in the pop-up window
• Click the Properties button
• Click the Advanced Speech button
• Click the Audio Input button
• Click the Properties button in the Audio Input Window
• In the drop-down window, choose Stereo Mix (this changes the sound source from your microphone to the play-back of your recording)
• Play the recording

How's the quality? Mediocre. For example, "Tutorial" is transcribed as "Two Orials."

So, you shouldn't transcribe straight from your SME's lips: record and then transcribe, so you can refer back to make sense of the script. On the other hand, Word can complete the bulk of the transcription understandably, and it's massively easier to Find and Replace or correct a transcription than it is to type it all by yourself.

If this doesn't work for you, there are internet transcription services where you can upload a sound file and have a Word copy emailed to you. I've used GMR, and they were timely and good.