Recognizing your employees is the first step towards creating engaged employees. For many companies this remains the proverbial first step on a 1000 mile journey.
A recent survey by the Gallup organization of 300,000 businesses found“75-80% of employees are achieving much less and feeling far less enthusiastic about their work than they could be. If all your employees were “fully engaged,” Gallup reported, your customers would be 70% more loyal, your turnover would drop by 70%, and your profits would jump 40%. Last, Gallup found that great employees also tend to engender “passionate” customers.” - Eric Brody, Healthy Conversations
Great employees are those employees fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in their roles building their brand. They are evangelists for their work, the work of their colleagues and their brand which they create together.
And what about those passionate customers engendered by these great employees? What do passionate customers do?
They tell their friends, their family, their colleagues.
What do they tell them?
Their story. Their story is composed of all the things big and little, observed and overlooked, created and delivered by those great employees, fully engaged employees, the employee evangelists.
See? The great employees story expands to include the passionate customers story, too. When that happens you have a passionate brand story to tell. And your engaged employees and passionate customers become evangelists for their story of their brand.
What do these evangelists engender?
- Lower customer churn
- Higher revenues from existing customers with up-sells and cross-sells
- Greater customer referrals that generate higher conversion rates
- Lower advertising costs
- Lower hiring costs as your employees become your recruiters
- Lower employee turnover numbers
- Lower employee training costs
- Higher cash-flows
- Sustainable businesses
And this journey starts with that first step: recognizing your employees.
Still, some may hesitate to even consider that first step. To help, I offer 52 steps organized into 4 categories. A simple action plan is included, too.
Each Tuesday for the next 52 Tuesdays I will discuss the next step in more detail. That's the date by each step.
Follow along. Or take the first step and share your experience with a comment or a guest blog post.
You can start with the first step on the list, Let Them Pick Out Their Aeron Chair. Or skip to the middle and start with Make it fun. Do you have a new hire joining your company soon? Start with the last step on this list and Make their welcome a grand welcome.
Here’s a sample action plan:
Define your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for goal. That’s the term Erika Andersen uses in her book Being Strategic.
What Metrics Best Measure Your Progress?
- How will you measure them?
- What reports will reflect them?
- Who uses these reports?
These are key decisions that will help you continue your journey by enlisting others to join you.
Consider the Net Promoter Score. It measures recommendability with a simple, 3-question survey.
Yes, I know its use with employees has not been sanctioned. But who better to ask than your employees if they would recommend ‘their’ company to their friends and colleagues?
Pace. How many steps? When? How often? And with whom? These are questions you should answer now. And answer them again as you see the results in person and in your reports. Email or call me if you want to bounce ideas or concerns.
UPDATE: November 4, 2013. I posted the first of these 52 steps in 2009, aggregating them into a single post in May, 2010. Since then three things have happened:
1. I write better. That's because, well I write every day, but also...
2. I think clearer. That comes from listening and learning to current business thinkers, reviewing my successes and painful failures, changing my life to focus on more positive resources and eliminate distractions; some refer to them as energy vampire, victims, cynics and naysayers.
I'll be posting my newest thinking (or my better writing) on this 52-week Plan for Employee Recognition Mondays-Wednesdays-Fridays. Then I'll update this post with their new content, category by category, about every month.
Note: I left the dates beside the older posts just for historical...fun. The first updated category with updated posts is the Empowering category. Enjoy.
CATEGORY:
Empowering
• Starting An Employee Recognition Campaign? Choose Your Metric First
• Employee Recognition Starts with Saying 'Hi'
• Ask: What Tools Do You Need to Do the Right Things...Right
• Provide Better Tools Than Your Competitors
• Recognize Your Brand Evangelists with a Dual Monitor
• Recognize Your Brand Evangelists with Their Own Aeron Chair
• Let Your Brand Evangelists Organize Their Own Party
• Engage Your Brand Evangelists in The Hiring Process
• Hire the Right People the First Time
Caring
• Call Your Newest Brand Evangelist the Night Before
• Want More Engagement? Know Their First Name and Use It
• Close Those Devices and Open Your Ears
• Hold Them Accountable; Hold Yourself Accountable, Too
• Show Your Brand Evangelists the Door
• Understand Their Dreams and Why They Matter
Championing
• Reward the disruptors: those who ask questions (August 10, 2010)
• Don’t let anyone waste their time. (August 17, 2010)
• Hold them accountable. (August 24, 2010)
• Protect them from abuse by all stakeholders: each other, customers, vendors, partners, shareholders, management. (August 31, 2010)
• Tell their boss how awesome they are, in front of them. (September 7, 2010)
• Be their friend, later. First, be their friendly leader/snowplow/roadpaver/resourcehunter/champion. (September 14, 2010)
• Make meetings meaningful…for them. (September 21, 2010)
• Be their Ronald Reagan: help them tear down those walls. (September 28, 2010)
• Know their dreams; know why their dreams matter to them. (October 5, 2010)
• Invest in their health. (October 12, 2010)
• Share your failures. It sets them at ease, shows your human, lets them know failures are ok. (October 19, 2010)
• Recognize the Gate-Keepers, the Routine-Makers. (October 26, 2010)
• Make it fun. (November 2, 2010)
Let Them Sparkle
• Greet them every day. (February 8, 2011)
• Offer them the most convenient parking spots. (February 15, 2011)
• Reviews should be to admire their carats, their color, their clarity…not the flaws. (February 22, 2011)
• Create a company snitch program: Recognize your unsung heroes. (March 1, 2011)
• Recognize the unsung, unseen, unheard heroes of the “night shift.” (March 8, 2011)
• Know the answer to this question: What’s their future with the company and why does it matter to them? (March 15, 2011)
• Know the answer to this question: what would change if that person left? (March 22, 2011)
• Treat them as you do your biggest customers. They are. (March 29, 2011)
• Treat them like your biggest investor: they are. (April 5, 2011)
• Find a success to celebrate together daily. (April 12, 2011)
• Read customer testimonials at company meetings. (April 19, 2011)
• Welcome the new hire with a grand reception. (April 26, 2011)
• Find your Net Promoters (May 3, 2011)
• Recognize Your Employees on Social Media (May 10, 2011)
DISCLAIMER: I do not offer this as THE definitive list of possible first steps, categories or even the plan as simple as it is. Their order contains flaws I’ll discover soon, perhaps. Many are steps I have taken with success. Others I wish I had known were right in front of me.
It’s a journey. This is the first step. Maybe sharing it here with you will inspire more to take this first step, too.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.