Let’s assume you and I are having a conversation about employee engagement and culture-building in your organization. You kick it off by telling me about your existing programs and some of the initiatives you’d like to introduce.
“That’s great,” I say. “You’ve told me what you have and want. Now, please tell me why you want to focus on engagement anyway?”
Odds are high that like most senior HR leaders your response will be tied to a strategic business outcome — revenue, ROI, performance, productivity, or a similar measurable benchmark. To put a finer point on it, the reason you’re interested in improving employee engagement is probably tied to a business benefit involving talent acquisition or retention. Usually that means something around acquiring top talent, retaining top performers, or reducing turnover. That was great thinking when the economy is running full-bore and the U.S. unemployment rate is 3.5%, as it was just a few short months ago, before the coronavirus pandemic. Then, it made perfect sense to focus on making your culture appealing and the jobs you offer fulfilling enough to meet those engagement goals.
The old saying that what got you here won’t get you there has never been more applicable than it is right now as you consider the value of employee engagement — what it means and why you are chasing it. If you’re chasing it at all. After all, it’s a buyer’s market, right?
- Unemployment is at an all-time high (11.1% in June).
- Jobs are as scarce as anyone can remember since the Great Depression.
So you’re probably among the companies that have, very properly, put most of their greatest efforts into course-correcting their corporate strategy and operational blueprint as they continue to move through an unpredictable and hugely daunting economic landscape. In fact, with so many workers in a sudden scramble to find jobs (over 17 million unemployed), companies might conclude that talent retention probably isn’t going to need to be challenge for a while. So why should you put any extra time and effort, let alone seriously precious HR dollars, into employee engagement?
Even considering that question is dangerous thinking. Let me expand on two truths that should persuade you that now is the most important time in recent memory to invest in the employee experience.
The Customer Experience Will Determine Winners and Losers
Every business hates losing existing revenue and seeing customer advocates close their wallets to you. But customer churn is exactly what almost every business suffers during events like the pandemic. To a person, each HR executive I’ve talked to in the last two months has been rightly concerned about this. Because nearly every business is susceptible in the wake of a broad economic disaster.
In fact, trying to retain and nurture customer relationships during a crisis like this one creates an unprecedented level of awareness to the truth that we are all being tossed about in the same boat. And when I say “we,” I’m not just talking about your business or your competition. Your customers, too, are staring into a deep abyss of the unknown.
- Your customers have been scrambling to meet totally redefined needs and resources for people, operations, and production.
- They have been adjusting their lives and their businesses as nimbly as they can.
- Like you, your customers need vendors, suppliers, and partners that will be human, creative, flexible, and empathetic toward their needs.
Employee Engagement Will Determine Your Customer Experience
What your customers need from you today is a level of engagement and a relationship that is deeper than ever. If you fail to deliver that, you may survive the pandemic, but you won’t thrive.
So, who is responsible for that relationship? Your employees, plain and simple.
Here is what will determine the level of performance and customer experience your company achieves: the vitality, motivation, and engagement your employees have to enthusiastically lean forward, actively listen, and creatively meet customer needs.
- As the world is now, and despite it being a buyer’s market when it comes to hiring, only your deeply engaged employees will evoke those characteristics and meet customer needs.
- Your unengaged employees will not only be a drag on your culture, they probably already pose a dire threat to your customer relationships.
But before you can set your company and your employees on a course to successfully meet this important customer experience challenge, you need to first understand the one glaring mistake that undermines most employee engagement efforts from the start: They invest in these programs for the wrong reasons.
Move Engagement From Being Transactional to Caring
Remember in our imaginary conversation when I asked why you want to focus on engagement? This is where we were headed. I asked because long before COVID-19, companies were stuck trying to understand how to get results from what is really a very simple, two-step process for effective employee engagement:
Step 1. Genuinely care about your people.
Step 2. Engagement will naturally emerge.
That’s why when I ask leaders to tell me their “whys,” I actively listen to hear if they are investing simply to check off the box, or because caring is the right thing to do. Better still, I wonder if I’ll hear them tell me, using whatever words or context are natural to them, that caring is part of their company’s DNA — an imprint of who they are.
Unfortunately, it’s rare to see a fundamental commitment of caring at the heart of a company’s employee engagement efforts. This largely explains why most engagement initiatives have failed and presents an even bigger challenge in our current environment. Why? Because genuine caring for each other has never been more important than it is right now.
Here’s What Genuine Care Looks Like
You should be asking, what does he mean by “genuine care” and what does it look in the business world? Genuine care means:
- Your organization authentically prioritizes the needs of others as an end in and of itself.
- Care is not a tactic or a means to a business outcome. It is not transactional.
- Having someone’s best interests in mind.
And this is where most organizations get tripped up. There is no “so you can get what you want out of them” in genuine care. You are not thinking transactional about the relationship between the employee and the company when you genuinely care for your employees. You are not implementing benefits, voluntary programs, or whatever incentives you might come across to keep people, increase productivity, or hit another tit-for-tat measure. You are doing it because you actually care about your people.
If you are an HR leader that is primarily motivated by transactional thinking (e.g., engagement programs = financial ROI), your efforts will be hurt from the start. Your employees will know that you don’t really care, because human beings are amazingly good at sensing that sort of façade. And we distrust their actions when we sense that someone’s alleged caring has other agendas behind it — that they want to see something in return. Transactional “caring” suppresses the naturally emergent fulfillment, engagement, and commitment that true caring catalyzes.
Quid Pro Quo Is a No-go
Everyone loses when care is transactional. First and foremost, employees don’t get what they deserve, nor what they urgently need in today’s new world. In our work using Self-Determination Theory with businesses, we constantly see that when employees’ basic needs for autonomy, mastery, and relatedness are not supported, their physical and mental wellbeing suffers. That’s because autonomy, mastery, and relatedness are the core of genuine care.
And if your employees suffer, so will your customers. We see that all the time, too. Because when their basic needs go unmet, employees are less able and not motivated to deliver an exceptional customer experience. And it’s this level and degree of service that is more important now more than ever for keeping and sustaining your business.
In a nutshell: Customers will not soon forget how they were treated during their own time of need. Your employees must be supported and cared for to be ready for that challenge. None of us can care for others if we don’t feel cared for ourselves.
Like all crises, this one is bringing into focus what is important at a human level. Caring for employees and customers alike was always the right thing to do. That it also is critical for your business should make the decision to commit to genuine care an easy one!
