Do you treat your employees like your customers?

Perhaps that’s a bit of a loaded question. It could be that your organization treats customers like months-old rotted fish. If that’s the case your employees are the least of your problems so go and fix that…seriously, go and fix it.

Good. You’re still here. Let’s start by asking a few questions:

• If you learn that a customer is dissatisfied with your service, what do you do to make things right?
• If you learn that a customer is no longer buying your product or service and is now going elsewhere, what do you do to change that?
• If you learn your overall customer satisfaction is lower than you want, how long do you take before you decide to do something about it?

Okay, now let’s swap out customer for employee and answer these questions again. Do you approach them with a similar mindset? What if your organization applied the same degree of focus on the internal retention of employees as it does on the external retention of customers? Stephen Covey wrote a few years ago:

Some organizations talk a lot about the customer, and then neglect the employees who deal with the customer. This mindset produces unmotivated employees, worker-manager disputes and poor business results.

If you’ve been unknowingly neglecting the folks inside your organization…it’s okay. You can begin to make things better right now with just a few bold changes.

1. Make employee satisfaction everyone’s job. Just as customer satisfaction should be owned throughout the organization and not the exclusive concern of one team or department, the same must be said for employee satisfaction. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is solely a human resource issue. Every single manager and leader must be responsible for the well-being and care of employees.

2. Find out how your employees are doing. Savvy organizations employ a wide variety of more traditional tools such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups to determine the state of customer satisfaction. Now, put these methods to work inside your organization. Start by having an open dialogue with employees (note that if this is something new in your organization, you’re going to also need to build trust in order to get candid responses). Schedule regularly occurring organization-wide town hall sessions devoted to workplace issues, successes, and challenges. And even though I’m not a fan of employee surveys, they can be effective in support of these other information gathering methods.

3. Make social media one cornerstone of your strategy. Don’t worry about whether or not you understand social media…I’m suggesting that you apply some guiding principles that drive it. These principles include authenticity, transparency, and shared ownership. Appreciate and encourage informal connections between employees and managers, particularly connections outside the more formal hierarchical lines. Lead the kind of change in how people within your organization relate to each other.

4. Communicate openly and often. If your customers hate being left in the dark about how you plan to improve their experience, your employees hate it even more. Don’t be a miser with information, even if you think it’s unimportant. Publish your plan for everyone to see, show the positive progress, show the places where things aren’t going as smooth, and be upfront with lessons that are being learned along the way. When there’s an absence of information, employees will definitely create whatever they want to fill that vacuum.

5. Finally, take decisive action. If you introduce these initiatives into your working culture, it’s absolutely necessary to take swift and consistent action. The key to success will likely rest in whether employees feel these changes are authentic and not just another “flavor of the month” activity from management. Empathize with your employees who may have been snakebit by change initiatives in the past and may view this with a wary and skeptical eye.

Remember that creating a passionate and remarkable customer experience begins with truly passionate and remarkable employees and working culture.