Employee Engagement

SO Disinterested or disingenuous employees are the biggest hurdles organizations must overcome to deliver a great guest or customer experience. In the life cycle of the service product a company will deliver, the company develops Standard Operating Procedures. These SOP’s are designed to help quantify the nature of service standards and ensure proper execution of the brand promise. Roles are defined between each front line employee and job descriptions are written for managers. Managers develop performance metrics for each employee and through proper coaching and follow up, a superior guest experience is achieved. Then why is the number one reason guests give for brand disloyalty is disinterested employees?

SOPs, brand promises, and vision are important components to a company but it must take comprehensive and extended steps to ensure engagement. Employee engagement, according to Swedish consultancy OPC, “… (is) the means or strategy, by which an organization seeks to build a partnership between the organization and its employees, such that: Employees fully understands and is committed to achieve the organization’s objectives” This sounds like a description of the Earth from space to me: round; mostly blue and white. Let’s take a look at what that may look like to front line employees.

A means or strategy an organization could employ to encourage employee engagement would be to develop a culture where front line employees have more control over workload issues and provide solutions for guest issues. This is called empowerment. Another high level term that may be lost on front line services providers. Do your employees know it is OK to solve a guest issue, without asking permission? Have you spent time investing in them on how to show empathy? Understanding? Do your employees feel empowered in their job? Imagine a time in your operation when every employee has emulated this and what kind of impact could this have on the business.

Building a partnership with your employees is more than having them solve their own problems; it is a true relationship with constant conversation both ways as in a good marriage. If one member of marriage only tells the spouse they love them once every three months, could you see how the other spouse can become disenfranchised? Why do we regulate employee performance reviews on a quarterly basis? To ensure the feedback happens. Why do we only give feedback once a quarter? Laziness, priorities, other projects. More frequent feedback sessions with back and forth discussions have shown to greatly improve a company’s ability to deliver exceptional results.

Once we have these programs in play, we need to follow up on them and nurture our relationships through appropriate discussions, goal setting, and celebrations. Survey companies can provide services to measure employee engagement and provide you with valuable insight on how to best leverage the results to more employee engagement. I have seen first hand the effects of failing to engage my employees properly and also the amazing results when I have. I cannot express the importance of engagement; this is something you may have t experience yourself to truly appreciate. All I ask is that you build an engagement strategy for your business. Your guests will appreciate it.

Haywood, Bob (n.d.) “How Do You Define Employee Engagement?” OPC, LTD.
Retrieved from the OPC website on February 9, 2010.
http://www.opcuk.com/downloads/defining_employee_engagement.pdf