Taking Care Of The People Who Matter Most
06.04.2008 | Chris Bailey
I’m always excited when a book on employee engagement comes into my field of vision. It just adds more validity to the principles and practice behind the work I do to help organizations design a remarkable work experience. A fairly recent book added to my library is Sybil Stershic’s Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care. For the most part, it is a thoughtful and useful resource for any organizational manager or executive who wants to build a strong service-oriented culture from the inside-out.
If you’re at all on the fence about about employee engagement’s connection to customer service, here are a few quotes to consider:
Employees influence what customers think about your business and determine whether (or not) they’ll establish and maintain relationships with your company.
It should be no surprise that the way people treat each other within an organization impacts how they ultimately treat external customers…good internal service drives good external customer service.
What You’ll Love About This Book
It’s short and to the point.
The book is just over 100 pages and Sybil lays out exactly what’s inside in the first paragraph:
This is a book about the “care and feeding” of the people who are ultimately responsible for an organization’s success. It’s about internal marketing – a blended approach focused on taking care of employees so they can take care of customers. It is about marketing and human resources, and management, and creating a positive customer-focused culture.
It’s actionable.
Each chapter ends with an Action Plan Starter Notes section to help you take the information of the chapter and rework it into your organization’s unique situation. In the last chapter, Sybil offers worksheets where you can take these notes and put them together to form an Employee-Customer Care Internal Marketing Action Plan.
It’s measurable.
Currently, one of the toughest things to find are statistics to support the impact that employee engagement has on organizational health and customer service. Many executives continue to view some of the key principles of employee engagement like respect and recognition as soft values which is their polite (and misguided) way of invalidating them. Which is why her use of statistics in many cases vital when it comes to making the argument for focusing more on the employee relationship.
It’s not just for corporations.
In a couple of places, Sybil addresses non-profit organizations and offers some ideas to help non-profits relate for-profit terms to their situation. While there could be a little more emphasis in the book for the non-profit sector, I’m impressed that she actually includes it in her thinking…most thinkers and writers in this space focus entirely on the corporate world.
I’d like to invite Sybil to share her thoughts and answers to your questions about how to create a great employee-customer care program. To kick it off, here are a couple of questions:
- If employee-customer care is such a powerful concept (and in many ways a no-brainer), why don’t more organizations realize this and focus more resources on it?
- In what ways can non-profits, particularly professional associations, build staff-member/constituent care programs? Are there any parallels from the for-profit sector that non-profit executives should include? Any differences to watch for?
I’m the third stop on the virtual book tour for Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most. The stops include:
June 1st, Kevin Burns posted a review at Burns Blogs Attitude.
June 3rd, Lisa Rosendahl posted a review at HR Thoughts.
June 4th, You Are Here
June 5th, Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing will be posting an interview with Sybil.
June 6th, Becky Carroll at Customers Rock! will be posting a review and interview with Sybil.
June 9th, Paul Hebert will be posting a review on the blog Incentive Intelligence.
June 10th, Phil Gerbyshak will be posting an interview on the blog Slacker Manager.
Check in with these stops throughout the next couple of weeks. More information about this new book is available on the WME Books blog, the book page on the WME online store and at the Quality Service Marketing blog. If you’re interested in buying this book, go directly to the WME online store and enter this discount code – 107VBT – to receive 20% off your purchase.
15 Responses to “Taking Care Of The People Who Matter Most”
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Chris, what a great post on the new book “Taking Care of the People that Matter Most”. Like you, I am thrilled when a book comes out and is focused on an organization’s most important asset. I will be sure to check this book out. Thanks for the post!
Judy McLeish
http://www.employeefactor.com
Chris, thanks for your wonderful review of my book! I’m happy to start a dialog with you & your readers on your thoughtful questions.
Q1: Why don’t more organizations recognize and respond to the powerful concept of employee-customer care?
A: If I had THE answer to this, I’d be writing to you from my own island in the Caribbean! Seriously, I believe it’s a case of benign neglect in many organizations where management doesn’t realize how much better they could be if they were more attentive to their employees. And for some organizations (especially those with toxic cultures), it’s a case of arrogance in which employees are viewed as expendable commodities.
Q2: Re: the application of employee-customer care to nonprofits, particularly professional associations.
A: While most internal marketing activities apply, there are critical nuances. One involves the consideration of volunteers – depending on an association’s structure, volunteers may be treated as “employees” or as “customers/members/constituents” or as both. How they’re treated will also be situation-specific. What’s most important is that volunteers be acknowledged and dealt with as a critical internal audience.
One distinct advantage that non-profits have, compared with for-profits, is that they’re more passionate about their missions … and being mission-driven (wherein employees understand what the organization is about & what they need to do to advance the mission) is a critical aspect of internal marketing.
Your question about nonprofits leads me to consider a future post about this subject. In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing what your readers have to say about this. And I look forward to any additional questions.
Thanks, again, Chris.
Hiya Judy, if you’re interested in the book definitely consider buying the book from the WME online store with the discount code above. And check back here…I have a feeling that we’re just at the beginning of a very interesting dialogue with Sybil.
Hiya Sybil, thanks for starting us off with your thoughts on those two questions.
Q1: I’m also wondering if it’s not a case where management thinking hasn’t caught up to organizational reality. There are a couple of times in your book where examples of poor engagement screamed industrial-age thinking and the belief that employees were cogs and the corporation was a machine. We still seem to suffer from a mechanistic perspective when it comes to the employee dynamic.
Q2: I’m hoping that we can get some of our readers who are non-profit and association professionals to weigh in and add to the dialogue. I think what can make working in a non-profit particularly challenging is the organization’s relationship with its paid staff. It can be very different from the corporate world. And you’re absolutely right about the critical nuances being different, particularly when it comes to dealing with volunteers as non-paid staff.
Thanks again for engaging in what I hope will be some very provocative discussions.
I agree, Chris, about some managers being stuck in the old industrial mindset. Unfortunately, this mechanistic way of thinking has been replaced by a cubicle mindset – or is that just a more contemporary description of the same approach?
I’m not quite sure what you mean by a cubicle mindset, but my guess is that we’re talking about the same thing. My understanding of the industrial mindset is grounded in the notion that organizations are machines and employees are simple cogs – easily replaceable with one specific purpose. If a cog is no longer considered usable, then its discarded. If it shows a weakness in an area, that weakness is hammered out. And the organization is best managed with an engineered efficiency. In essence, the same mentality that drove textile mills and manufacturing plants 150 years ago simply rolled over into the office environment without much thought as to whether it actually made sense in that space.
I believe that in order to help organizations truly harness the best in their people and fulfill the employee-management dynamic, we’re going to need to be in the vanguard of helping organizational executives shift their mindsets. Some of today’s best entrepreneurs are already there and it’ll be with their additional help (or think of it as “peer pressure”) that I think we’ll see a stronger employee-customer care mentality spread wider.
Chris, we are talking the same thing, just different semantics. The cubicle mindset is a contemporary metaphor that symbolizes how some executives view the partitioned masses as interchangeable, disposable commodities.
My frustration is why it takes so long to sustain a change from that mindset. The importance and impact of employee-customer care is not a new concept … we just have to keep plugging away until it’s more firmly entrenched. Perhaps we need to go about it differently?
Sybil, I think your frustration is common for all of us. Judy McLeish suggested an idea along the same lines, which is maybe the traditional approach we’ve been trying to implement is not the best:
http://employeefactor.com/2008/06/maybe_the_traditional_approach.html
For me, the positive thing is that we’re really just at the beginning of a new time in the history of work. What we’re experiencing now are the growing pains as organizations grope for something that will work for the long haul. So, yeah…we have to keep the faith and keep plugging away, experimenting with new ideas, approaches, and practices and be part of the process to firmly entrench what we know will work.
[...] Chris Bailey of The Alchemy of Soulful Work [...]
[...] June 4th, Chris Bailey posted a review of Sybil’s book on his blog Bailey Work/Play: The Alchemy of Soulful [...]
Hi Chris,
Great review…and this is definitely on my summer reading list. I would like to purchase but can’t get your discount code 107VBT to work- any suggestions?
Tesa Lutz
[...] June 4th, Chris Bailey posted a review of Sybil’s book on his blog Bailey Work/Play: The Alchemy of Soulful [...]
Tesa, I checked with my publisher and learned there was a glitch in the code that’s now been fixed. I apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for ordering my book!
[...] June 4th, Chris Bailey posted a review of Sybil’s book on his blog Bailey Work/Play: The Alchemy of Soulful [...]
[...] and external – they all deserve the same regard and respect. Like my friend Mike states, keep personal [...]