Question: When should you start engaging employees?
Answer: During the hiring process.
It’s important that a potential hire is aware that an organization’s cares about their success and that they understand the work environment and culture right from the get-go. If a potential hire knows what’s expected of them and what they can expect of the company, the employee will be far more engaged from day one.
As the saying goes, the early bird gets the worm.
It also needs to be instilled in the beginning that employee performance directly relates to customer satisfaction. You need to let your staff know what you expect of them and how they should treat the customers. You don’t want to waste time down the road teaching your employees the basics. Tell them up front. However, in order for them to be accepting, you need to provide an enjoyable working environment and give them freedom.
According to a recent Customer Management IQ article, Optimizing Performance, Customer Satisfaction Through Employee Engagement, there are a few tips to help facilitate this:
- Do not scare employees of taking risks or making mistakes
- Let them make gut reactions about what to do
- Let them improve their decision making skills
- Give them freedom to be creative in reaching solutions
By providing a more laid-back environment, employees will be more productive and your customers will be happier – both resulting in business growth.
The challenging part of this is tracking your success. You think you have a great Voice of Employee and Voice of Customer program in place, but how can you assure that these are the components related to business growth?
A great way would be to send out employee and customer satisfaction surveys. Whether they are quarterly or annually, these tools are great to gather feedback, track progress, and turn insights into positive change. You can hear what employees are saying about the work culture, management and any other current issues. You can also tap into customers to gauge how they feel about the customer service they are receiving, what they like, what they recommend you to change, etc.
The goal is to then take the survey results and see if they relate to the improved business results. Ideally, they will and results will show:
Increased employee engagement + increased employee performance = increased customer engagement.
But remember, you must start early on!