Employee Engagement: What and Why
What the heck is employee engagement anyway? Let’s start with what it’snot…
Employee engagement does not mean employee happiness. Someone might be happy at work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are working hard, productively on behalf of the organization. While company game rooms, free massages and Friday keg parties are fun–and may be beneficial for other reasons–making employees happy is different from making them engaged.
Employee engagement doesn’t mean employee satisfaction. Many companies have “employee satisfaction” surveys and executives talk about “employee satisfaction”, but the bar is set too low. A satisfied employee might show up for her daily 9-to-5 without complaint. But that same “satisfied” employee might not go the extra effort on her own, and she’ll probably take the headhunter’s call luring her away with a 10% bump in pay. Satisfied isn’t enough.
Definition: Employee engagement is the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals.
This emotional commitment means engaged employees actually care about their work and their company. They don’t work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.
When employees care—when they are engaged—they use discretionary effort.
This means the engaged computer programmer works overtime when needed, without being asked. This means the engaged retail clerk picks up the trash on the store floor, even if the boss isn’t watching. This means the TSA agent will pull a bag suspicious bag to be searched, even if it’s the last bag on their shift.
Engaged employees lead to better business outcomes. In fact, according to Towers Perrin research companies with engaged workers have 6% higher net profit margins, and according to Kenexa research engaged companies have five times higher shareholder returns over five years.
How does employee engagement lead to higher stock prices? The ROI of engagement comes from what I call the Engagement-Profit Chain:
Engaged Employees lead to…
higher service, quality, and productivity, which leads to…
higher customer satisfaction, which leads to…
increased sales (repeat business and referrals), which leads to…
higher levels of profit, which leads to…
higher shareholder returns (i.e., stock price)
As former Campbell’s Soup CEO, Doug Conant, once said, “To win in the marketplace you must win in the workplace.”
Creative Sales Tactics
In today’s competitive marketplace, you’ve got to get creative if you want prospects to listen.
Most of us don’t associate the word “creative” with “selling.” For some, “creative” conjures up images of starving artists dressed in black, “trying to make a statement” with paint and old auto parts. “Creative” people wear berets and read The Village Voice. Salespeople wear ties and readThe Wall Street Journal.
At least those are the popular stereotypes. But don’t salespeople create things, too-like opportunity? Don’t salespeople create demand for products and services? Customer satisfaction? Wealth?
The nature of the sales process is, in fact, creative. A good salesperson creates demand where it doesn’t exist. He or she creates a message (the sales pitch) using various media (face calls, telephone calls, written presentations, slide shows) that influence an audience (the prospect). A salesperson explores new territories (cold calls), introduces new ways of thinking (persuades prospects) and makes the world a better place (provides customer satisfaction).
OK, maybe I’m overstating the case a bit. Lots of perfectly productive salespeople are nothing more than harvesters of existing business-they take orders, fill out paperwork, collect their commissions and go home. And they never break rules.
Those salespeople still play a role in our economy, although they’re on their way to being replaced by order-processing technology. But I’m here to talk about creative selling, the favorite activity of wild, vibrant, risk-taking sales fanatics-the Michelangelos of sales. These people use the power of ideas to create customer satisfaction and wealth for themselves and their companies.
Think of Creative Ideas
Ideas are scarce. They don’t exist until someone creates them. They can be copied, but only after the original hits the market. Because there’s nothing to compare them to, the price of an original idea is determined solely by perceived value. There is no competitive bidding or price shaving for market share-just the seller’s ability to create perceived value by presenting the idea as a solution to the buyer’s needs.
GetItDone 