An engaged employee is your biggest brand advocate. The engaged employee will convincingly promote your products, services and organisation to your customers. The engaged employee will help you retain customers because the customer will have enjoyed the experience. The customer will be left with the impression that they have just had a good deal mainly because your employee believes in the product. Your customer, on having this experience, will love your organisation, mainly because your employee obviously loves the organisation.
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This is powerful.
Your customer doesn’t deal with senior management. Your customer’s first, and usually only, experience with your organisation is through your front line employees. If your employees don’t make a good impression, then your customer will probably buy from your rival and won’t return.
Getting Your Employees To Love Your Company
The key here is to put your employees first. Th
ey are still working within an organisation with a stated objective to care for your customers. The customer is still very important. So important that you are going to invest in your best customer service resource, your employees.
In the pursuit of customer excellence, train and develop your employees in your product line, the skills of their job and n the ethos of your company. Promote your belief in customer service through engaged employees. Recognise and celebrate successes. Learn from what happened to bring this about and call out the key contributions from the employees involved.
The biggest challenge in this approach happens when an employee has made the wrong decision and it should be overturned. Instead of highlighting the mistake in a negative way, look at it as a positive learning opportunity. Discuss it with your employee. Discuss how it can be rectified and empower your employee to do the right thing. Recognise this when it happens. This will be a powerful tool in developing the creativity and innovation within your workforce.
A workforce that isn’t afraid of being embarrassed or humiliated when they make a mistake won’t be afraid of trying new and creative methods of succeeding in their job. When this happens, they learn to love their job because they are contributing to the success of their team and organisation. They will know it because they feel the achievement, innovation and success at an individual level.
The Individual Employee
Most people approach every situation with a key thought in mind: what is in this for me? This is why we need to encourage employee engagement from the individual level upwards in our organisations. It is difficult to get a team to fall in love fully with the organisation because there is always a risk that only the key players are speaking. We need to connect with individual employees and get to know them better. Know their interests and passions, what they want to achieve.
We need to connect so individual employees can contribute to team and organisational success. The bottom line is that research consistently demonstrates that companies with high engagement have twice the customer loyalty than companies with average employee engagement.
An investment in employee engagement will most definitely lead to improved business outcomes.
What are you doing to encourage your employees to love your organisation? Are you putting your employees first?
