Five Ways To Treat Employees Like Customers
07.07.2008 | Chris Bailey | Focused on Business,Customer Experience
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.
12 Responses to “Five Ways To Treat Employees Like Customers”
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Chris,
This one is rockin’ me. Your timing is perfect.
I’m out of town doing business which means lots of time in restaurants and hotels. Which means lots of time watching how those establishments treat me.
So I started watching how they treat each other: behind the reception desk, the waiter’s station, and even in the kitchen when it’s at least partially visible.
The external customer experience is, as you pose, a reflection of what’s happening internally.
As a long-time OD consultant that is a principle to which we hold fast and try to introduce as part of our work. Yet it is surprising how difficult it can be to have it accepted and acted upon. Somehow, the stubbornness of the human condition wants to hold onto the notion that unhappy or mistreated people on the “inside” will somehow bubble over with joy and enthusiasm on the “outside.”
I’m with you on this one big-time. It’s a message that needs to be shouted from the rooftops and then looped
Keep writing, Chris…
I’m a Unix System Engineer. This is funny to me because it’s one of the tactics I use in interviews to get a job. I tell the interviewer that I have two sets of customers, external customers who want to buy stuff from us, and internal customers whom I serve by making sure their systems run stably so they can do their job. The interviewers have so far eaten that line up time and again over 15 years.
Great post, Chris. And I think asking the reverse question is equally critical: Do you treat your customers like your employees?
Thanks, Steve. It *is* enlightening to just observe how workers treat their colleagues and their organization when they think no one is paying attention. As for your experience with internal/external care, I’m also amazed at the stubbornness. I think this is yet another vestige of our industrial past when the job was done with little regard for the true welfare of the worker. It’s sort of a mind/body split set to the modern workplace. We’re getting there, just taking a while.
Safe journeys in your travels, friend.
Howdy “website design”…I would love it if more folks and managers promoted this view and then developed the structures to integrate it into the working culture. Turns out that if we work in an organization, we all have internal customers. Easy to see why this has helped you snag those jobs. Thanks for adding that great idea and perspective to this post!
Sybil, that’s a great suggestion! By turning it around, it keeps organizations from navel-gazing and forgetting their whole reason for existing. The best orgs seem to be those who see the symbiotic relationship between the care of employees and customers.
[...] 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.” [Bailey Workplay, read more] [...]
My daughter works for a bar-b-que place. On days she is allowed to work, she makes good money, but the owners refuse to give her a schedule and tell her they'll call her when they need her. They were the ones who called and asked her to work for them. The man who owns the place wants her to flirt with the customers and makes snide remarks about her not being "well endowed". The wife and husband are very upset at one another and talk bad about each other in front of my daughter. Since we live in the mountains and jobs are hard to come by, she needs this job. My daughter is a teenager and has a car payment and phone bill to meet every month. This makes me very upset with these people as I feel they are very disrespectful . Am I wrong?
Deanna, you're not wrong. I'm a dad to two girls that there are two particular things in your comment that trouble me. One is that the owner of this business is expecting a teenager to flirt with customers. The second is that he's making remarks about her body. I'm no employment law expert but I believe both of those things border on (if are not fully) illegal.
I know you say that jobs are hard to come by, but there's the matter of how this is impacting her self-esteem and her attitudes toward work itself. It's easy for me to advocate that she get out of this job immediately, but there's so much wrong about this situation I worry for her. I hope you and her figure out how to find work where you live that doesn't compromise her integrity and place her in a crappy situation. Good luck and let me know how it goes.
Chris, I agree with you 100% – if that girl were my daughter, I'd want her out of that situation IMMEDIATELY. You are right, her self-esteem is much more important.
Chris,
This is a great post. I believe the internal audience should always be first and foremost whether it is about the brand, customer service, reputation or crisis management.
It isn't what you say that creates success it is what "you" do and unless it is a one person operation that means what each and every person in the organization needs to understand what must be delivered. Those people also have tremendous influence on what their family and friends think of the organization based on how the people who work there talk about it off the job.
Not to mention, treating employees right both reduces turnover (a huge business cost) and attracts more qualified applicants for openings. Employees who 'get it' and 'believe' will create a great customer experience and much more.
Thanks for the excellent blog and this post in particular…
Rick
My recent post RTRViews: RT @chris_bailey: Think customer service only happens outside the org? Nope, your employees are critical too http://bit.ly/bbh6Df <GREAT!
Appreciate your thoughts, Rick. Lately, I've heard more folks say they wouldn't recommend their company's products or services to someone else. Why? Because they know how these customers will be supported and cared for. People talk and referrals are made based on one's reputation – you won't tell a friend to so something if you know the outcome will be negative. Thanks again for sharing your insight.