Grant Leboff: Shuan, what’s interesting is, in marketing, people talk about turning their customers into fans and getting word-of-mouth referrals from customers. In the book, you also talk about the importance of turning employees into fans which, I think, a lot of people sometimes miss. Say just a little bit more about how you go about doing that.
Shuan Smith: We found in the research that we’ve done that there’s about an 85% correlation between the way your customers feel about your brand and the way that your employees do. If you really want to create advocates amongst your customers, you first of all have to create advocates amongst your employees. When you do so, they behave in a way which is on brand, which is on purpose.
An example of that was 02, the telecommunications company. Some years ago they decided to create fans amongst their customers and part of that was licensing what was called the Millennium Dome into the 02 arena. [The Millennium Dome was built by the UK government as part of the millennium celebrations on the south bank of the River Thames in central London] The O2 arena became a entertainment venue that O2 made available to its best customers as a thank you for being great customers and as a different experience.
The first thing they did, though, having rebranded the Millennium Dome in the O2 arena was to take many of their own employees there for a big party. It was a huge concert party for all of their employees. Because what they said was they recognize in order to turn their customers into fans, they had to, first of all, turn their employees into fans. Therefore, they wanted their employees to experience what the customers would experience before they did.
Another thing that’s so important, it’s that mirror, it’s that parallel process of creating an employee experience which is the mirror for the customer experience, because both of them become stronger, become more authentic, become more robust as a result. I think the worst thing of all is when a company talks about one thing, about delighting its customers, and is miserable to its employees.
It’s interesting if you’re looking at the press of the last few weeks. You may have seen there’s been a lot of comment about minimum wage, minimum living wage, and restaurants that are changing the contractual conditions of their employees in order to try to make ends meet, if you will. There’s a lot of debate about how is it that these organizations can be so unfair to their employees and at the same time trying to give a great service to their customers.
The answer is, well, you can’t do those two things. You have to create a means to be fair to both to give a good experience to both.
Grant Leboff: What are the key ingredients in creating a great employee experience and therefore, having those advocates internally because it’s probably something that people have the aspiration to achieve? What are the tangible steps that need to be taken to make it happen?
Shuan Smith: The first one really is to be clear about what motivates your employees. Of course, we think it’s money and that is part of it, but it’s not the biggest part of it. The biggest part of it is feeling that the employee is valued and is creating value. When we feel that we are doing something which is in itself meaningful, which is purposeful, and we feel that what we do makes a difference, that is incredibly satisfying. It’s something which becomes intrinsically rewarding.
Yes, we need to have money, we need to have salary in order to keep ourselves whole, but what really motivates people is that sense of making a difference. It doesn’t matter what level you are in an organization, it doesn’t matter how junior you are, you still want to make you feel that you’re making a difference.
Treating people in a way, connecting them, and the work that they do to making that difference is the first thing. It isn’t just I turn up, I do my job, I go home. It’s I turn up and I do this, which creates value for my customers and for my … That is about communication, it’s about training.
Secondly, I think it’s about the way that they’re led. The day-to-day interactions with managers and supervisors, people often say, “You don’t leave companies, you leave the manager.” I think that’s true. People may say, “Well, I’m leaving for more money,” but fundamentally often what’s driving people leaving an organization is dissatisfaction with the relationships that they have at work with their peers or their manager.
It’s leading people, in a way, which makes them feel part of … and belong to part of that unit. Then, I think, it’s creating conditions at work which just reinforces the fact that you are in the right place. You feel you have friendships, you have communications, you get feedback, you feel like you’re growing, you feel like you’re developing, you feel like this is an important part of your life as opposed to just a job of work to be done.
All of that then creates the employee experience. Now some organizations are being very intentional about creating an employee experience using exactly the same methodology as they do for the customer experience, so looking at all of the touch points along the employee journey and saying, “How did we really differentiate at that touch point?”
We were doing some work some years ago for a very well-known fashion retailer and when you looked at the advertisements to the customers, they were vibrant, they were funny, they were just very creative. When you looked at the employees or rather the advertisements for the employees, they were incredibly boring. They were just so boring and uninspiring, and wasn’t true. The reason was because it was the ad agency that created the customer advertisements, and it was the HR Department that created the employee advertisements.
We said, “Why don’t you get the ad agency to do both,” and we did. That just bought the two things together.
Grant Leboff: You talk about the importance of employees feeling like they’re making a difference. To what extent do you think it’s important, especially in today’s world with the multiplicity of communication to empower employees?
Shuan Smith: Empowerment is very, very important because when people feel that they have some level of control or power over their circumstances is when a lot of the stress goes. There’s been a lot of research to show that the most stressful thing that you can do is to disempower somebody. If they feel they have no opportunity to influence the outcome, that’s when stress levels go through the roof, so empowering people, giving them a freedom within a framework…
So yes, people do need to have a framework, they do need to have guidelines, they do need to understand what they can do, what they can’t do, what they can decide, what they can’t decide because you give people some latitude. That is usually much more motivating for them, and by the way, they’ll usually make much better judgments than otherwise.
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