Category: Engagement

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Engagement

Thoughtful Quotes for the Workplace

Here is more employee engagement advice, and it comes from an unusual source.

I’m getting ready to retire my 2009 pocket calendar for the year; it’s the kind that features quotes each week.

Paging through it I found the following quotes that are applicable to employee engagement:

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”  George S. Patton

“Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too.”  Robert Half

“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.”  Albert Einstein

“Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down.” Jimmy Durante.

“We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.” Hegel

 

 

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Engagement Marketing

A Gift to Improve Employee Engagement

This holiday, give the gift of employee engagement … and it’s free!  Employee Engagement Advice Book is a new e-book written by members of the Employee Engagement Network (EEN) and compiled by network host David Zinger.  EEN members (including me) share advice – limited to one sentence each – on how an organization can improve employee engagement.

The book contains over 200 contributions from people who are passionate about employee engagement, including several featured in this blog: Terry Seamon (see his advice on page 6); Kevin Burns (page 9); Paul Hebert (page 28); and Richard Parkes Cordock (page 35). (My contribution is also on page 35.)

Recurrent themes include communication (especially listening), valuing employees, empowering them, recognizing their efforts, and leadership involvement. It’s worth scrolling through to find the quotes that resonate with you. Pass it along and share it among your colleagues … to inspire them and/or reinforce their employee engagement efforts.

Happy Giving!

 

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Engagement Marketing Training & Development

Zappos Culture Book: Best Ever Business Reading


Zappos.com’s 2009 Culture Book is here (!) and I’m thrilled to add it to my business library – next to the previous edition that I got on my visit to Zappos last year.

The book is written by Zappos employees who share what the company culture means to them. It’s a beautifully designed and produced book, supplemented with color photos and captions that capture the true spirit of Zappos. The book includes Zappos core values, a brief time line of the company’s 10 year history, and, most important, what the people who live the Zappos culture have to say about it.

Regardless of where they work in the company (customer loyalty center, merchandising, finance, technology & project management, Kentucky warehouse, marketing, etc.), Zappos employees share how valued they feel as members of the Zappos family … how they engage in “serious fun” … how they’re empowered to do and be their best … how they live the company’s values … and how truly happy they are to work at Zappos everyday. (Would your employees say the same? Honestly, I don’t know that many companies whose employees love their workplace.)

Zappos Culture Book should be mandatory reading in every undergraduate business class, MBA, and leadership program.

Read this book to your kids at night, and I swear they’ll tell people “When I grow up, I want to work at Zappos!” This is no fairy tale – Zappos is for real.

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Engagement Marketing

Memo to Senior Management: Take Care of Your People

Memo1

I found this great quote from Dr. Judith M. Bardwick:

“When people are perceived as a cost and not a resource, when they are treated as a liability and not an asset, when no one seems to know or care that they are there, they don’t work well, and they don’t stay.”

Who are these ‘people?’

They’re your employees … your contractors, vendors, and consultants … your partners … and ultimately your brand advocates or – depending on how you treated them – your brand adversaries.

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Engagement

Breaking Up (with Clients) is Hard to Do

Self-employed consultants can’t risk becoming disengaged from their client work, especially if they want to maintain their professional brand; i.e., reputation and credibility.

They can, however, voluntarily leave a client. While this is a viable option, it’s not easily made.

Consider this situation that a colleague described to me.

“I quit my long term client – even in this terrible market. Doing projects with them was ruining my health and after seven years of various engagements, the last one was just too much to tolerate and I left. They have become a horrible entity – not paying bills, imposing a terrible climate of fear and austerity on their people, making consultants and contractors beg for seriously eroded wages …

Its employees have also felt this pain, exist in an environment of fear and anger, and are nowhere near the can-do proud enthusiastic workforce I was introduced to when I first started consulting with this client. The company imposed extreme austerity measures on its workforce … while sitting on huge reserve assets and bragging to Wall Street about how they could weather this recession just fine.

I am proud of myself for quitting. I’ve had other small projects over the last several years, mostly  at this client. But now I need to learn to do something else …”

In my own 20+ years experience as a consultant, I know how difficult it is to walk away from a client, especially in such a tight market. (To those of you considering the ‘glamour’ of going solo, keep in mind: everyday you’re self-employed, you wake up unemployed!) So I’m proud of my friend for having the courage to leave and preserve her mental & physical health, despite the economic uncertainty.

Fellow consultants who care to share: what did it take for you to voluntarily leave a client?

 

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Engagement

“The Power of Federal Employee Engagement” – Not Just for Feds

Even the U.S. government is focused on employee engagement these days. A study by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board explored the link between employee engagement and outcomes, and the results confirm “employee engagement has a strong, positive impact on organizational outcomes in the Federal sector.”

The study found six drivers of Federal employee engagement:

  • Pride in one’s work and workplace
  • Satisfaction with leadership
  • The opportunity to perform well at work
  • A positive work environment
  • Satisfaction with received recognition
  • Prospects for future personal and professional growth.

The federal government competes in the same labor market as the private sector and is similarly challenged to improve outcomes within budget constraints. Despite differences in the public vs. private workplace, ALL managers can learn from the insights and recommendations found in this study.

You can find the special report The Power of Federal Employee Engagement. [Source: the Employee Engagement Network]

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Engagement

Employee Engagement Today (and Tomorrow)

I was recently asked to speak to a management group. When told the topic was “How to Engage Employee’s in Today’s Economy,” I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. It’s a popular subject these days, but seriously, how is engaging people now any different than engaging them in good times?

I’m not talking about HR-focused firms looking for new ways to better engage their employees. What gets me are those companies for whom employee engagement is a totally new concept. You know the ones where “our people are our greatest asset” is mere rhetoric (by the company) and wishful thinking (by the employees).

These companies are primarily interested in learning about engagement because they’re looking for a quick fix. But when it comes to effectively engaging employees – by means of a workplace that fosters open communications, trust, respect, and leadership – there is no instant remedy. As they’ll learn when the economy improves and their employee turnover rate soars.

Ever the optimist, however, I figure better late than never … maybe this time they’ll learn.

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Engagement

Interview with Sarah Perry on Innovative Approaches to Internal Communications

Sarah Perry is Sales and Marketing Director at SnapComms, a New Zealand based firm that provides innovative technological solutions “with a pragmatic approach” to improve internal communications and strengthen employee engagement. I wanted to interview Sarah because I was impressed with the way SnapComms applies new technology to address real employee communications issues, not just offering tech tools that are cool to use.

Company Overview 

SnapComms offers a fascinating array of tools that facilitate top-down, bottom-up, and lateral communications within organizations. For example:

  • Snap Shots– interactive screensavers that can be used to share corporate initiatives and encourage employee participation
  • Snap Mag – an electronic employee magazine that includes user-generated content to keep employees informed while effectively managing (and helping to reduce) information overload
  • Other “Snap” interactive tools that make social media easy for internal communicators to use and help streamline communications, such as desktop alerts, newsfeeds, and targeted intranet updates.

SnapComms serves a global client base in the UK, USA, Canada, South Africa, the Middle East, Australasia, Caribbean, and South America. Its client companies range in size from 50 to 29,000 employees.

QSM: Based on your experience, Sarah, what are the top 2-3 communications challenges organizations are struggling with today?

Sarah: Resource, in terms of hours in the day versus workload, seems to be a huge issue right now. Organizations are downsizing their internal communications teams or expecting existing teams to manage an increased work load. I also think that social media can suck up a lot of time and presents some significant challenges to internal communicators (e.g., monitoring trends on external social media channels; also dealing with the reality that internal communications need to be faster and more authentic or ‘stories’ break on their own and are not always accurate). In other words, the role has become more complex and time critical, whilst unfortunately, the resource is reducing.

QSM: Given the expansion of communications technology going forward, how will organizations best balance the “high tech” and “high touch” elements of internal communications?

Sarah: I’m not sure that “high tech” and “high touch” need to be mutually exclusive. (I’ll assume that “high touch” means the face-to-face types of communication.)

Social media is making it much easier for people to connect regardless of location, and tools like Webinars are almost as good as face-to-face for building relationships. Video will start to replace some of the more traditional town hall meetings (especially if you can use delivery tools that monitor who is viewing and allow interaction).

I think the “high touch” is really the domain of line managers (from an internal communications perspective). The focus will increasingly move to line managers, and we need to raise the profile of communications as a key part of a manager’s role. Some of this can be achieved by providing guidelines and training and measuring and managing communications as a KPI [Key Performance Indicator]. There’s a need to actively reward good managers and coach those who need it.

QSM: What scenario(s) do you project regarding how organizations of the future will use internal communications to engage employees?

Sarah: Internal Communications has become more of a recognized discipline over the last few years; this will continue. (I’m always pleased when a smaller organization approaches us and clearly realizes the benefits of good internal communication. Fortunately, we are seeing this more and more).

Other trends will be:

    • Cloud computing will make remote collaboration easy and affordable, so it will become more commonplace.

[Here’s how Sarah explains cloud computing.] From an employee    communications perspective, this means low cost, scalable software solutions offered as a service which anyone from anywhere can access (typically via a web browser) and collaborate with anyone anywhere (with appropriate security). This is nothing fundamentally new – the key difference is that corporates are now more comfortable with using solutions like this. This is mainly due to the fact that hardware can now be ‘virtualized’ which makes the solution ‘redundant’ [meaning] very reliable and cost effective; i.e., if a server somewhere falls over, other servers elsewhere in the cloud automatically pick up the slack. Current examples include salesforce.com and Google docs.]

  • The reducing cost of bandwidth will make tools like video conferencing and multimedia in general much more prevalent.
  • Social media will no longer be called ‘social media’ – it will just be another channel or tool in the tool kit.
  • Micro blogging will have found its very small niche (from an internal communications perspective) and the hype will have died down.

I did read an interesting blog post about holographic communications being less than 10 years away due to quantum computing – now that will be an interesting town hall meeting!

QSM: Thanks, Sarah!

Categories
Engagement

New Study Confirms Employee Engagement’s Positive Impact

The latest in employee engagement research continues to confirm its bottom line benefits through improvements in customer satisfaction/loyalty and employee retention.

The Aberdeen Group studied more than 300 organizations with engagement initiatives to benchmark best-in-class performance. A complimentary copy of Aberdeen’s report, Beyond Satisfaction: Engaging Employees to Retain Customers, is available through Oct. 2, 2009.

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Customer service Engagement Marketing

Interview with Chip Bell on Internal Customer Service

Chip Bell has been writing about customer service for as long as I can remember. An internationally renowned consultant, speaker and author, he has written several customer service classics, including his latest book, Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers, co-authored with John Patterson. [Note: see my review of his new book.]

I asked Chip to share his expertise and insight on the topic of internal customer service.

QSM: What do you see as the relationship between internal customer service and external customer service?

Chip: The requirement for remarkable external service is exactly the same for internal service. The quality of the service the external customer gets is a match set with the service that is delivered to colleagues internally. Go to the “back of the house” of any Ritz-Carlton hotel and you will observe the exact same service between associates that you will see the front desk clerk deliver to a hotel guest. Internal service reflects the organization’s true commitment to remarkable service.

Service between internal units is sometimes like getting service from a monopoly service provider. If you don’t like the service from your Department of Motor Vehicles, you can’t take your business elsewhere. Likewise, if you get poor service from the HR department as an employee, you often cannot go to another HR department like you might abandon a Sears for a Nordstrom. However, it is important to remember that almost all internal units could be outsourced. Job security does not always come with being the sole source, especially in challenging economic times.

When customers (internal or external) do not have a choice, and get poor service, they often take out their frustration on the front line person. It suggests perhaps an even higher standard from units or organizations that are the only game in town.

QSM: Based on your extensive experience in the field, what would you site as an example of great internal customer service?

Chip: Several exemplars come to mind. Sewell Automotive (Dallas) has been the #1 car seller in the nation across most of their brands—Lexus, Infiniti, Cadillac, GMC, etc. One of their secrets is the terrific partnership between sales and service. Other examples include USAA (San Antonio), the insurance company that caters to the military, retired military and military dependents. Zappos.com and Amazon.com are both best in class as e-tailers for their great handouts and superior internal service.

QSM: Who should be responsible for internal customer service?

Chip: The same people who are responsible for external customer service—everyone! Customer-centric and customer-focused organizations, like the ones already named, make every employee responsible for remarkable service. A service ethic is hardwired into their organizational DNA. I asked a waitress in a Ritz-Carlton hotel restaurant what she liked most about her job. “Working here at the Ritz has made me a better wife and parent,” she said. “The values that we practice at the hotel with each other and with the guests are the values that make all relationships special.”

QSM: What advice do you have for companies struggling with maintaining customer service (both internal and external) in an environment with reduced resources?

Chip: As cash-strapped customers seek service, they expect more and more value for their hard-earned funds. Customers may not always be able to judge the quality of the products they buy or the fairness of the price they have to pay, but they are always gifted at judging the quality of their service experience. It is the front-line that creates that experience.

When companies started making cuts, they should remember to spare the most important variable in their customer’s definition of value. Front-line employees should be respected, heard, trained, empowered, and affirmed for their crucial contribution to the company’s reputation. It is important to remember that employees learn how to serve customers by the way they are served by their leaders.

QSM: Thank you, Chip!