Can You Hear Me Now? V 1.0

The linkage between employee engagement and customer engagement is undeniable.  As I wrote in my book, your customers will never love your company if your employees don’t love it first.  If the employee experience is poor, it will be difficult for employees to delight your customers.

So how do you ensure your employees are engaged, have a great experience at work, and give you discretionary effort, which we all know is the magic dust that leads to extraordinary business results?  You ask them.  You listen to them.  You find out what’s working and what’s not.  You acknowledge and appreciate their input.  And you implement employee’s ideas and solutions to improve the business.

When you roll out a formal program to gather feedback from employees, your world will change.  Employees will begin to trust senior leaders and to feel an emotional connection to your company (the definition of engagement).

You may be wondering why a formal program is necessary.  Simple.  Because it’s not human nature to speak up.  People must be asked for their thoughts, opinions, ideas and solutions; they are not going to offer them up freely, even though they have them.

Think about your interactions with companies like Southwest Airlines, Zappos, or Ritz-Carlton; these companies have created intentional cultures of employee experience, happiness, and engagement because they know that if their employees are miserable, their customers will be, too.

So how do you listen to employees and find out what thoughts they have to take your customer engagement and your profits to a higher level?  In next week’s blog – Can You Hear Me Now? V 2.0 – we’ll delve into several solutions that my teams and I successfully implemented in multiple industries to get results.  Stay tuned.