By: J.R. Labbe, CEC
Fact: Your customer experience will never exceed your employee experience. It’s a reality that can’t be ignored, especially in an age when Gallup research shows almost seven in 10 employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged.
Employees who spend their days clock watching, doing the bare minimum to stay under HR’s radar, or are covertly planning their escape are all symptoms of an unhappy workplace.
A whopping 80 percent of employees say they would change jobs to find more fulfillment. That doesn’t necessarily mean they want to leave their current employer. It might mean their skills and talents aren’t being used to their fullest in their current assignment.
Across industries, waning customer relationships are an increasing focus of leadership. At Becker Healthcare’s recent CEO/CFO Virtual summit, an underlying current in the conversation was the crucial role of relationships with patients. Even the most human-centered business has a customer crisis, with retention weakening because of declining employee engagement.
Engaged customers are what create business growth and your engaged employees create engaged customers.
Qualtrics, a global experience management firm, offers a simple equation to explain today’s conundrum of what’s making our people unhappy: Employee satisfaction = experience/expectations.
The denominator – expectations – drives the outcome.
Where do employee expectations come from? Numerous places, and your company has slim control over most of them. Sure, what you tell-and-sell during pre-hire interviews and at new hire orientation is information you are communicating intentionally. But is it reality for your current team members? Are your recruiters and your managers saying the same things? And does all that track with your mission, vision and core values statements, which likely are in the new hire booklet but largely are relegated to hallway posters that have the operational impact of wallpaper.
It takes is a digital device and a matter of seconds for job candidates and potential customers to check out what’s being said about your company. Business review platforms, glassdoor, google, Yelp, your own website, various publicly reported data – your story is being told. Do you know what it says about your company? How are you staking up with other players in your industry?
Numerous research organizations have sliced and diced data to determine what today’s employees expect. The list can be overwhelming, given this is the first time in history we have five generations in the workplace simultaneously: Silent Generation aka traditionalists (1928-1945), Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Gen X (1965-1980), Millennials (1981-1996), and Gen Z (1997-2010).
Despite the stereotypical generalities of each generation, some commonalities transcend the chronological divisions: autonomy, clarity, purpose and potential. “Primed to Perform” authors Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor call it total motivation.
“To build a high-performing culture you must first understand what drives peak performance in individuals,” Doshi and McGregor wrote. “The answer sounds deceptively simple: why you work affects how well you work.”
As C-Suites tighten their financial belts by combining or eliminating chief positions, leadership responsibilities are being pushed down to the director and manager level. Bright, young MBAs are being thrust into positions requiring relationship building, listening and coaching skills for which they are unprepared. Too often, what takes the place of connection, listening and questions is command-and-control management, the slayer of autonomy and potential.
Managers who are tuned in to team-member expectations are gamechangers for organizations. Gallup research shows 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement is determined by just the manager, whose quality is the “lowest hanging fruit for soaring customer success and real revenue growth and earnings increase.”
There’s only one way to find out your team members’ why and what they expect, regardless of their generation: Ask them. The most important habit of a great leader is engaging in one meaningful conversation every week with each team member/direct report. This goes beyond a morning “hello” or “how was your weekend.” The only way to find out what motivates your employees is through connection, listening and asking questions.
Former award-winning journalist Jill “J.R.” Labbe, CEC, is co-founder of CSE Leadership LLC, an executive coaching and leadership consulting firm. jrlabbe@cseleadership.com
