“You can’t be the best place to buy, if you’re not the best place to work.” - Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question Survey.
Exactly.
Is it possible for a company to be particularly and disproportionately good at social media and external-facing social business first, and then shore up their culture and employee focus second?
In a word, in the only word....No.
Oh sure, take a snapshot of time and you can fool some of your stakeholders, customer and employees, some of the time. But truth always triumphs, as hard as it is to say that in these day, and social media and its power to share experiences honestly, openly, transparently with no filters or permission needed from management, PR firms or spin doctors is the hammer of truth.
Can you make your customers happy without having happy employees first?
In a word, in the only word....No.
C'mon, think about it. Can the employee made miserable today, desperate and depressed and denied, bring happiness to their colleagues today...or customers tomorrow? A headache starts as I write that question. It's the headache of cognitive dissonance. I can wrap my head around a lot of things, things that even scare me (President Newt Gingrich...yeah, that scared you, too.). But I can't wrap my head around this idea that unhappy, disenfranchised, disengaged employees can create anything but a mirror of themselves in their customers: unhappy, disengaged, indifferent.
Back to the title of this post. Your business, its brand and message and promises, is already transparent. As a business leader, you created it then, you create it now. You may be opaque about it, as you hide behind reports or customer service scripts or customer return policies or infantile HR policies and manuals. But that is wiped clean when your phone rings or email bongs with a customer who wants your promised offer.
And this is so easy to understand, so seamless in its execution, I have a hard time understanding why so many companies led by truly smart, well-educated, folks pretend to not grasp its power.
This riff was inspired by a great post by Jay Baer at his site Convince and Convert. They post is titled Comparison of 100 Top Companies on Social Business and Corporate Culture. (Sounds kinda academic. It's not. Very readable, very useful. ) All three quotes above are pulled from that great post.
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