The Net Promoter Score is oftentimes used by organizations to help them measure and understand customer loyalty. This score is measured simply by asking customers, “on a scale of 1-10 how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” It has also been suggested that instead of asking customers how likely they are to recommend a company that they instead be asked, “do you actually recommend our company?” Both of these questions can help understand customer loyalty.
But, what about the loyalty, the engagement, and the morale of our employees?
A few months ago I wrote that if I had to pick one metric on which to base the success of emergent collaboration efforts that one metric would be company morale (or something close to it such as engagement or fulfillment). Why don’t more organizations have an internal employee engagement score similar to the NPS for customers? After all, what’s the point of measuring customer loyalty if companies don’t measure the loyalty of employees?
Telus is a great example of a company that just does this. In fact they have something called the “likelihood to recommend” score which helps them understand how their employees feel about the company. Telus is also serious when it comes to engagement, but for Telus engagement isn’t about comments, how many times employees log into a platform, how many groups or discussions are created, or how many ideas are submitted. For Telus, engagement doesn’t focus on activity, it focuses on how the employee feels. Meaning, does the employee feel inspired when they get to work, do they feel connected to the rest of the organization and do they feel fulfilled with the work they are doing. That is what true engagement is all about
We try to do such a good job of trying to understand our customers and how loyal and engaged they are. Why don’t we divert some of this attention to trying to understand how loyal and engaged our employees are? Start off with the simple employee engagement (or whatever you want to call it) score. One simple question that you can ask on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. In fact, if you are using an emergent collaboration platform already you can simply make this a question that employees see when they log into the home page.
Every organization needs to develop their own “likelihood to recommend” or “employee engagement” score to help them understand how engaged, connected, and loyal their employees are. This can be just as simple as the NPS above, “on a scale of 1-10 how likely are you to recommend working at our company to a friend or family member?”
Most employee studies are of the ‘satisfaction’ or ‘engagement’ type, in application by companies like Gallup, Mercer, Kenexa, Forum, Hay, Towers Watson, and many others. The biggest concern with trying to use these approaches for customer-centricity effectiveness and employee/culture linkage to customer behavior is that there is more correlation than causation between the two. Also, in the case of satisfaction, just like the connection of customer satisfaction to customer loyalty behavior, the standard is too low. Employee satisfaction, like customer satisfaction, is a fairly benign, passive, reactive attitudinal state.
Engagement, which alll of the above employee research vendors have applied since the ’90’s, is the next rung on the ladder beyond satisfaction. The challenge here is that there is no common standard for engagement, something that I addressed several years ago with a posting on CustomerThink: http://www.customerthink.com/blog/driving_customer_loyalty_behavior_through_employee_ambassadorship_vs_employee_engagement Many of the companies doing this work have stressed the correlation of employee engagement to customer satisfaction; but, here again, it is far more about correlation with a low-level standard, rather than causation of one to the other.