Employee Engagement: An Essential Ingredient for Business Success
Posted 01/20/2009 by Dr. Rhoads in Allegiance, CRM & EFM, customer feedback, customer relationships, employee feedback
In the consulting work that I do with companies, I find that businesses looking for ways to increase their sales and profits often overlook a critical ingredient: employee engagement.
The reason this is an important ingredient is because there is a direct connection between employee engagement and customer engagement, otherwise known as “The Spillover Effect”.
For example, in their book, Return on Customer: A Revolutionary Way to Measure and Strengthen Your Business, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, founders of management consultancy Peppers & Rogers Group, emphasize that “Motivated employees are clearly more productive and keep a company’s employee churn rate down, which lowers expenses. Yet they also have a profound impact on customers as well by creating positive experiences through efficient and smart customer service.”
And, my colleague, Dr. David Whitlark and I, have also found this to be true. For example, in a large research study that we conducted on engagement, we found that one out of every 10 customers was hurt by disengaged employees. We also found that the work environment combined with employee attitudes has a significant impact on a customer’s perception of quality. For this reason, it’s important that companies lead with their strengths, emphasize the positives, and remove the barriers that lead employees to be disengaged with their jobs, their organization and customers.
After all, in the end, the Spillover Effect is much more than a discussion about employee happiness. It is about emotional engagement that is continually shared from employee to employee, employee to customer and customer to customer. And it is a concept that encompasses and impacts all aspects of a business, ranging from company culture to profits.
Companies that understand and leverage the Spillover Effect to their advantage will realize higher customer and employee engagement, and ultimately, greater profits.
To learn more about this topic, read the new Allegiance “Spillover Effect” white paper.
Dr. Gary Rhoads, Allegiance Loyalty and Engagement Expert
Excellent post. I particularly agree with your call to action: “it’s important that companies lead with their strengths, emphasize the positives, and remove the barriers that lead employees to be disengaged.” Each of these elements is critical, and each should be addressed at the foundational level of the company — its very culture.
I believe a culture of appreciation, reinforced through a strategic employee recognition program, addresses each of these elements:
1) Lead with strengths — company leaders invest a great deal of time in developing the company’s values and objectives, those things the executives believe to be its strengths, but how many employees actually know what those values are, much less how they apply in their day-to-day work? Strategic recognition praises employees for actions and behaviors reflective of the values or objectives, reinforcing and encouraging repetition of precisely those behaviors needed to allow the company to “lead with strengths.”
2) Emphasize the positives — obviously, when recognizing employees for their work, you are emphasizing the positives. Formalizing and recording this praise in a recognition program lets you track these “positives” over time, by region, or by employee to begin to notice trends and areas for possible needed intervention to increase the positives.
3) Remove the barriers — strategic recognition also encourages opening up the opportunity to recognize good performance to all employees in a peer-to-peer format. By encouraging everyone to notice and appreciate the above-and-beyond efforts of their colleagues, leaders begin to foster cooperation and a true culture of appreciation instead of one of competition.
I blog extensively on this topic of culture of appreciation and strategic recognition here: http://globoforce.blogspot.com.