It’s quite remarkable! In a world of incessant change it is a barometer of consistency. It never seems to change.
Recent surveys indicate employee disengagement is around 70%. This is what it was 10 years ago! So, despite more than a decade’s attention, headlines and efforts, we have made no headway at all in rectifying this. Why not?
There could be any number of reasons, but perhaps the first and foremost could be that the executive managers are not engaged themselves. This would inevitably make them sceptical about any employee engagement initiatives and so inhibit the outcomes. Thus it seems critical to establish whether executives themselves are engaged. But how would you know?
It seems to me that the obvious place to start is with the customer experience. How much experience does the CEO have as a regular customer of his own business? (“Regular” means basic grade service where they are treated as any other customer and not given any privileges or favours by virtue of who they are or their position.) It should be standard procedure for any executive to routinely test this. If it is not possible the next best thing is to personally monitor:-
- Customer complaints and how they have been dealt with
- Lost business
- Lost customers
Yet how often does this happen? My recent customer experiences indicate that it is extremely rare. Only by doing this can you readily ascertain where your shortcomings lie and what you need to do to sustain your business. It is also a key way to gauge the engagement of your employees.
There is a rider to the Simon Sinek statement, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” It is “Employees will never love a company unless they know that executives love it first.” This is a first principle of corporate leadership. Only then will employees be proactive and look to prevent or redress potential problems when they first come to their attention. It is impossible for any customer to love a company where that does not happen.
The beauty of this approach is that it does not add anything to existing workloads or employee engagement initiatives, because it is – or should be – already part and parcel of all your systems and procedures. Properly done, it will ensure the effectiveness of any employee engagement initiatives you have. This should dramatically increase the level of employee engagement and so help reduce those persistent levels of disengagement.
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”