Tag Archives: employee engagement

At Connection Cafe: Don’t Take Your Staff’s Engagement For Granted

by on June 25, 2008 in Business

Today I published my first post for the Connection Cafe, Convio’s company blog. I’m hoping it gets some energetic and passionate comments so head over there and start a dialogue.

Connection Cafe is largely written to the nonprofit audience, but if you’re from the corporate world don’t let that scare you off. I’ll be dealing with the same themes there as I do here with Bailey WorkPlay…but more pointed to the NPO crowd.

Here’s a snippet:

But then, I would follow this with something usually less obvious: without an engaged staff, there would be no members wanting to bring their dues, participation, and energetic passion. Too often, professional associations and non-profits expend so much of their focus on what lies outside, they can overlook the very people who make things happen inside every single day (don’t worry, for-profits are not immune either). There’s a reason why many non-profits are not run solely by members or volunteers. It’s because the professional paid staff have the experience, skills, and talents to help members and volunteers achieve great organizational goals.

Go read the whole post…

Taking Care Of The People Who Matter Most

by on June 4, 2008 in Business

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.

Need A Lie Detector? You’ve Got Bigger Problems Than That

by on May 18, 2008 in Work

From the “Sad But True” file, it appears that British businesses could soon be employing lie detectors as a way to deter healthy folks who call in sick for work. And if American Idol, The Office, and countless other Brit imports are any indication we’ll be seeing something similar in the U.S. any day now. You can already imagine where I stand on this imbecilic nonsense. My reaction is similar to Judy McLeish’s who wrote Voice Risk Analysis to Identify Those Feigning Sick – Is This a Joke?. Look…if your company thinks it has problems with employees calling in sick just to play hooky you need to take a good look at how you are engaging them. Instituting a lie detector not only misses the bigger picture, it literally pushes them out the door.

You’re Going To Need A Bigger Hammer For The Square Peg

by on May 8, 2008 in Work

Over at Mission Minded Management, Michelle Malay Carter asks whether hiring star performers can be a mistake. At the heart of the question is the danger of hiring someone who is overqualified per the job role (as well as underqualified):

Our data shows one in five people is in a role that does not tap their full capacity, i.e. they’ve been overhired in a role. In contrast, only 15% are slotted in roles that they simply do not have the mental bandwidth to handle. So our data shows that overhiring is a larger problem than underhiring. Either shoots engagement in the foot.

When I was a hiring manager, the notion of job fit was important. The last thing I wanted to do was bring in someone who had a more advanced skillset than was necessary for the work defined by the carefully crafted job description. Isn’t that how we’re all trained by HR when we interview candidates? You find square pegs for square holes. Well, what if that approach, that system is what’s broken?

A square hole may turn out to be a teeny tiny box.
If you craft a job description too tightly, how can you possibly hope for an employee to be able to move freely about? I’ve seen job descriptions that honestly ought to be called job “prescriptions.” No need to worry about a manager micromanaging an employee – the job role has it’s own built-in mechanisms to do it for them.

What you can do as a manager…Focus on setting the position’s big picture. Start with wide boundaries and let your employees co-create the work details along with you.

A square hole may need to be a round hole at times.
Be careful what you wish for. You might want an employee who meets the specific criteria laid out in the job description. Ahhh…but then the job needs to shift to meet new organizational goals. You now have a potential misfit to contend with.

What you can do as a manager…Think broadly and openly when weighing your candidates. Consider their aptitude for being flexible when work needs to shift. Consider altering the job description to better fit a candidate who offers some intriguing upsides to the organization or brings new strengths to your team.

Square pegs can become round pegs over time.
What? People learn and change? Yes, Mr. Organization it’s true. That individual who you hired last year and was perfect for the role has now exceeded the expectations and competencies of the job description. So, now what do you do? Ignore it and hope they won’t notice? Promote him or her? Start making subtle hints about how exciting working at that new business down the street might be?

What you can do as a manager…Learn about what other talents your employees bring to the party. Could be the individual sitting right outside your office has a skillset that could lead to a breakthrough in how your team does things. Ask what types of things your folks like to learn. Just don’t assume that your square pegs are always going to be square.

Regardless of what this all may sound like, I’m not knocking the ‘concept’ behind work roles. Each employee must know what their core work is and what’s expected of them. Boundaries are essential to engagement. But the art of employee engagement is knowing how to build constructive boundaries that tap into each person’s unique qualities and help them bring them into their work. A round peg in a square hole may be complaining because he or she wants the freedom to bring more of themselves to the organization. And it’s to the organization’s detriment not to find out how to meet this desire.

(And if you’re interested in learning more behind Michelle’s post which inspired this one, head over to Mission Minded Management…the thought and care she uses in thinking about these issues never fails to amaze me.)