Quality Service Marketing
In contrast to the clueless company mentioned in my last post, I’m going to again cite Marriott.
Check out what Mike Jannini, Marriott International Executive VP, had to say about his company’s employee-centric approach in a recent address at the Creating Value through Service Symposium.
Companies that are employee-focused are inherently customer-focused. Being customer-focused alone is not enough (and a poor strategy) when employee value is only lip-service.
In his June 24, 2008 article “If the customer comes first, where does that leave employees?”, Steve Crescenzo shares a story about a company whose approach is “Customers First, Employees Last.” [Updated note: access to Steve’s article is for Ragan.com Select Members. Ragan offers both free and select membership options on Ragan.com. It also offers My Ragan, a free social network for corporate communicators.]
This ‘customers first-employees last’ approach may not be what management intended, but it became the reality of the corporate culture as experienced by employees.
What’s especially disturbing is that an internal communications professional within the company tried to bring the situation about employee frustration to management’s attention – specifically in a proposed article entitled “Does ‘Customers First’ Mean Employees Last?” for an online employee publication. But management nixed the idea; they didn’t want to hear it and/or didn’t want to deal with it.
Unfortunately, the company described here isn’t unique. There are too many firms with customer problems – evident through constant complaints and customer churn – where the solution is to come down hard and put pressure on employees without actually engaging them to assist with solutions. (Why bother asking the employees who have daily interaction with the customers? If they were so smart, they’d be in management instead of on the front-lines!)
Hint to managers who think this way: customer dissatisfaction doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Besides worrying about customer retention, take a look at your employee retention.
This post will continue my spotlight on Mustang Engineering, a company truly committed to all its stakeholders.
It’s also one of the few companies I know that has a dedicated internal marketing department.
I asked Liz Stevens, Mustang Marketing Communications Specialist, about the purpose and scope of their internal marketing function. Here’s what she shared with me:
“The purpose of internal marketing is to promote Mustang’s unique, people oriented culture and to keep Mustangers happy. We strive to provide a place people actually look forward to coming to every day and where they can enjoy who they are with and what they are doing. Fun, fun, fun! The scope is ALL Mustangers, worldwide. No matter where they are located in the world, we want all Mustangers to feel connected to the Mustang family.”
This reflects and reinforces the company’s vision: Our quest is to embody a culture that inspires super-motivated people to make heroes of Clients, Partners, Vendors and Mustangers.
In my internal marketing workshops, I suggest companies ask their employees the question, “Would you refer a friend to work here?” as a way to gauge the quality of the corporate culture. I can only imagine a positive response to that question at Mustang Engineering.
When I talk about recognition in my internal marketing workshops, I share an example of a company that sends birthday cards to its employees. The value of this practice (especially compared to excellence-in-service and sales type recognition programs that single out exceptional performers) is that EVERY employee is recognized and acknowledged once a year.
At a recent workshop, one attendee had an “AHA!” moment when she talked about how her company sends birthday cards to its customers, yet it didn’t do the same for its employees. (I’m sure she’ll remedy the situation.)
Of course customers are valuable … and so are employees. Is your organization missing an opportunity to tell employees they’re just as important?
I’m excited to be a guest on the Women in Business program on wsRadio, hosted by Dr. Gayle Carson, this evening (April 15) at 7:30 PM EST/4:30 PM PST, where I’ll be interviewed about my book, Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.
Dr. Carson (aka the “Wiz of Biz” and a “Spunky Old Broad”) has built her career on advising and coaching CEO’s and entrepreneurial managers, so I’m really looking forward to talking with her.
Hope you’ll tune in tonight for tonight’s broadcast!
This isn’t an April Fool’s joke – bad bosses have a lot to teach us (especially by example). And you don’t have to go very far to learn from them.
Bad bosses are a hot topic these days. Witness the best selling book, The No Asshole Rule, Zane Safrit’s “Worst bosses of the Year … so many choices” and Management-Issues’s “The Search for World’s Worst Boss.”
I’ve had my share of bad bosses. Fortunately, none would have been contenders for the World’s Worst list. In retrospect, I learned some valuable lessons from them – mostly about how not to treat employees.
Here are my top three lessons learned:
If you’ve worked for a bad boss, please share what you learned as a result.
I came across this “vision statement” that was meant to rally employees in an organization and industry undergoing change.
(Note: I’ve done some minor editing only to disguise the name and type of company,)
“We are ONE TEAM determined to build a thriving organization.
We understand that consumers will always have more choices; therefore our actions must by driven by what they need.
We will inform and empower our community through new products and yet-to-be imagined ways while we adapt and sustain our organization well into the future. We will drive urgent change.
By doing this, we will build a thriving organization, admired by employees and customers for making our community an even better place in which to live well, do business and prosper in a free society.”
I admit that I don’t know the circumstances of who created this vision statement (presumably a management team), how it was positioned, and how it was introduced. But its tone really put me off.
While the ultimate intent — to “build a thriving organization … for making our community an even better place” — is lofty, to me the language used throughout the vision statement sounds heavy handed: “We are ONE TEAM … our actions must be driven … we will drive urgent change … “
And then there’s the corporate ego that refers to “a thriving organization admired by employees and customers …”
So I ask you: is this a place you would want to work?
If you read this vision statement differently, I would love to know your reaction.
Concern for employees’ satisfaction is more than just a “feel good” aspect of management. Wharton professor Alex Edmans’ recent study confirms that happy workers positively impact financial success.
His study examined the stock returns of companies from Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work for in America” between 1998 and 2005 and found they had higher financial returns – more than double those of the overall market.
According to Edmans, “One might think this is an obvious relationship – that you don’t need to do a study showing that if workers are happy, the company performs better. But actually, it’s not that obvious. Traditional management theory [still] treats workers like any other input – get as much out of them as possible and pay them as little as you can get away with.”
Part of the problem is rooted in managers’ short-term thinking as they are measured and rewarded on short-term results. Investing in employees, however, is considered to be a long term proposition … despite the fact that it can pay off.
Edmans’ research is the latest of numerous studies citing the financial impact of employee satisfaction. One of my favorites is the 1997 classic The Service Profit Chain, by Harvard B-school professors James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Leonard A. Schlesinger, that documented the self-reinforcing relationship between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and the bottom line. While a lot has changed in the 10+ years since the book was published, the need to pay attention to employees is as important as ever.
I’m fascinated by audience reactions when I introduce the concept of internal marketing in my marketing training workshops. (Compared with attendees of my internal marketing presentations, these workshop participants are unbiased in that they’re not expecting to hear about internal marketing as part of marketing training.)
Following a recent training session, one young woman approached me to tell me she really got what internal marketing is all about. She shared the following saying [source unknown] that she felt best summed up internal marketing’s empathetic approach to employee-customer care:
People will forget what you said.
People will forget what you did.
But they will never forget how you made them feel.
Exactly.
PS. If anyone knows the source of this quote, please share it with us.
Hold the merriment for a moment, something is happening in the workplace. Walker Information’s 2007 Loyalty in the Workplace study found employee disloyalty is on the rise. The percentage of “high risk” employees (36%) – those who plan to leave their employer within the next two years – now outnumbers the percentage of loyal employees (34%). This trend is frightening when you consider the costs of lost productivity and high turnover
Walker also reports that despite employees’ overall willingness to be involved in strategy development, just 44% indicated that they were involved. And only 50% of the employees felt senior leaders communicated the strategy well. (More evidence to support the need to listen to and engage employees as mentioned in my last post.)
There’s no one simple solution. According to Walker’s 2007 Loyalty Study, the top experiential drivers of employee loyalty include:
In other words, it takes more than just a once-a-year bonus to keep employees.