Keeping employees happy and motivated is an agenda item that is on everyone lips, but little action seems to be happening. As a result, Employee Engagement is slipping as well, which is a problem for Customer Experience.
The New York Times ran an article, “Why You Hate Work” that explains that the way we are working isn’t working for today’s employees. The article reports that a mere 30% of Americans “feel engaged at work,” according to the 2013 Gallup poll, leaving the remainder somewhere between indifferent and disgruntled.
To me, a great Customer Experience is only provided through employees that are engaged. The fact is when employees are happier, so are your Customers. When Customers are happy, they spend more money with you and you make more profits.
So the truth is, employee happiness and the resulting engagement is very important to you, even if it hasn’t been your priority of late.
What Walmart and Google Show Us About Employee Engagement
Take Walmart as an example. BusinessInsider.com ran an article about how the workers are planning a strike just before the Shareholder’s meeting a couple of months ago. The strike is about higher pay, better benefits, more full-time employment opportunities and the alleged retaliation measures taken against employees who dare to speak up about such things.
I don’t know if you have been to a Walmart lately, but the fact is, the experience is less than stellar. I have written about it before, so I’m not going to get into the details. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the fact that employees are striking across twenty cities this summer might have something to do with the change in service quality.
Here’s a look at their stock over the past year:
Source: Nasdaq.com on 10 September 2014
On the other hand, Google has great employee engagement. Their satisfaction rating by employees is 99%. Google, is well known for having an Empowered culture that encourages employees to take ownership in their role in the company’s success.
As a result, take a look at their stock price over the past five months:
Source: Nasdaq.com on 10 September 2014
Most of us like the look of the Google chart over the Walmart chart! Of course, if you know the difference between Correlation and Causation, then you probably know that I haven’t exactly proven that employee engagement and stock price are directly related. Clearly, there are many other factors that go into a company’s stock price. Nonetheless, our intuition tells us that engaged employees produce more than employees that aren’t, and that affects the stock price.
What’s the problem?
Employees are a lot like customers in that their work experience is greatly influenced by their emotions and their subconscious. Actions that seem innocuous to management can be interpreted an entirely different way by the employees, resulting in any number of emotions that do not drive value for the relationship. These emotions can destroy the relationship your employees have with your organization the same way they do for customers.
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