Employee is just a legal term...

You know it's the right thing to do.  You've heard the statistics, read the white papers and even had the conversation.  Heck, your company mission statement may even have the words in it... “Our employees come first” or “Our employees are our most important asset.” 

But the real question is what are you really doing about it?  As you've read on this blog over the past couple of years you know I believe that employees are one of the foundational elements of your business.  And for service companies probably the foundational element.  They are your brand.  Whether you are product-driven or service-driven your employees create the value you deliver.

Who do you love...

And taking care of them is one of the smartest investments you can make.  To help you find your way through all the information available and find an actionable plan that will help you I am participating in a “virtual” book tour.  Bloggers around “interweb” are reviewing, commenting and providing input to promote and highlight the book, “Taking Care of the People who Matter Most – A guide to Employee-Customer Care.” by Sybil F. Stershic. 

While not a huge book (less than 150 pages) it does pack a lot of information and guidance into those pages.  While many books on employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation may find one theme and beat it to death until the book weighs a certain amount Ms. Stershic takes a different approach.

The book quickly makes its case for the value of employee engagement through a quick tour of the research and studies that show that employees drive business success (see sidebar.)  Once the groundwork is laid – the rest of the book focuses on the steps you need to take in order to implement a strategy that will connect and engage your employees.  While not new to the business world, this book advocates that companies create an “internal marketing strategy” applying many of the same tactics most companies (including yours I'm sure) use to connect and engage with their consumers. 

Each chapter ends with a quick exercise... which help you plan and manage your internal marketing strategy.  You know that any theory is only as good as the implementation and this book goes the extra mile to provide the actionable steps needed to change your organization.  The last 40 pages give you a nice check sheet to follow in order to ensure you've covered your bases.

A couple of the  quotes from the book that resonated with me particularly (given the focus of this site)...

“Applying marketing internally allows an organization to focus on those representing its true competitive advantage.  ....- competitors cannot duplicate the relationship an organization's employees have with its customers.”

“... two separate but integrated components of internal marketing:  attitude management and communications management.  Attitude management involves motivating employees to buy into the organization's customer-oriented values, while communications management involves providing and managing the information that employees need to perform effectively.”

I agree in principle with these quotes and would only offer that when a company truly believes in the mission and value of the organization you don't need to get employees to “buy-in” as much as you need to continually communicate the value and position of the company.  I cannot get someone to “buy-in” to something that doesn't resonate personally with them.  It's a nit but I will pick it just the same because I think many companies try to use incentives and rewards in a duplicitous way when the company really doesn't have a position or value system.

Selfishly, I liked the fact that Ms. Stershic often brings in rewards and recognition as a way to drive behavior – who could argue with that.  I could point out that a few of the suggestions are the more “generic” types of programs you see everywhere, but then again – they are offered as a way to get your mind working not to provide a specific recommendation for your internal strategy.  As with an external marketing strategy your actual tactical implementation plan is driven by your specific products, position and consumer.  Same with your internal strategy.

“Taking Care of the People who Matter Most” doesn't try to plow any new ground as much as provide a great summary of what is already there – and give you a way to put it to work.  A difficult task but one done very well.

Think Personally not Legally

I would like to close this post with a quote in the book from Bob Wood at Wood Dining Services – a company highlighted in the book...

“To me an employee is a legal term; it's not how we should look at our people.  They have kids, they have ambitions, they have goals...we want this to be the best job they ever had.  Plus we want them to advance and evolve to get better jobs over time... So to me, it always starts with our people.”

I never considered the fact that the one word we use to reference those we rely on for delivering the value of the organization are referred to in “legal” terminology.  This is a blinding flash of the obvious.  If we use legal terminology to refer to our value creators – does that impact the way in which we manage and engage with them?  Just thinking out loud.

Virtual Tour Info

Don't forget to check out the other comments/interviews/reviews... tomorrow is Phil Gerbyshak who will be posting an interview on the blog Slacker Manager.

Previous comments were:

• June 1st, Kevin Burns posted a review at Burns Blogs Attitude
• June 3rd, Lisa Rosendahl posted a review at HR Thoughts
• June 4th, Chris Bailey posted a review on his blog Bailey Work/Play: The Alchemy of Soulful Work
• June 5th, Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing posting an interview with Sybil
• June 6th, Becky Carroll at Customers Rock! posted a review and interview with Sybil

Other links to keep in mind:

• The publishers blog: WME Books
• The book page on the WME online store - Bonus!!!  On the WME online store you can get a 20% discount by entering this code: 107VBT (FYI- the code only works on the WME site)
• Sybil's blog:   Quality Service Marketing

Comments

[Sybil]

Paul, thanks for your review and participating in my online book tour. Your point on employee "buy-in" is well taken. I also like your description of employees as "value creators" instead of expendable commodities, which is how too many organizations treat their employees. I'd love to hear your readers' thoughts on this.

[Bennet Simonton]

Not all people are valuable assets, but the vast majority could be if only they were managed properly. The problem is very, very few managers and HR people know how to do that.

Many companies, even those with HR departments, do a very poor job of managing their employees, a poor job of unleashing their full potential. A considerable store of creativity, innovation and productivity exists in every person and the management challenge is to unleash that store and apply it to the goals of the organization.

So what model of management should be used to maximize the use of that potential? Is it the top-down command and control model so pervasive in business or is it some other model?

I spent my first 12 years of managing people using the top-down model and was frustrated that about half of my people were not performing anywhere near as well as I wished. My best people, the self-directed self-starters, were performing far above the average and I wondered why the others could not close the gap.

Then I read a book on organizational management which informed me of how important the workforce was, actually more important to achieving goals than I. I had to admit that I was so busy giving orders and figuring out what my next order would be that I had not ever really listened to these VIPs. So I started listening and found that they had many complaints, suggestions and questions, all of which I attempted to resolve to their satisfaction. In some cases, what they wanted was not what they needed and I took time to explain why, but most of the time they were at least partially on target.

An amazing thing happened. As I went about resolving their concerns, their performance improved almost in lock step. In fact, after some months I realized that as a group my people were about twice as capable as I had thought possible.

A few years later, I developed some tools that proved capable of converting the vast majority to being self-directed self-starters just like the best people always were. Once again, I was amazed to find out that my people became twice as capable as I had thought possible or four times as capable as I had originally thought possible when using the top-down approach.

Management's problem is the top-down approach because by its very nature it demeans and disrespects its employees and thereby "leads" them to demean and disrespect their work, their customers, each other and their bosses. Using top-down, executives concentrate on providing lots of direction through goals, targets, visions, and lots of orders. The implied message of all this direction is "shut up and listen, you are just robots" and thus fails to meet their most basic needs of being able to put in their "two cents", being a valued team member, and being respected.

Thus, in using the top-down model, managers and executives become their own worst enemies.

Best regards, Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"

[Sybil]

Well said, Bennet. I agree with your assessment of the problems of the traditional top-down model. In my experience, I also witnessed the executive ego that gets in the way of listening to employees. The message is, "I must know what I'm doing, because I'm in a position of power. So why should I listen to you?!"

Fortunately, there are some executives who are humble and smart enough to proactively listen to their employees.

[Pat]

Thanks for sharing the book...haven't heard of it.

Though companies may expound the value of their employees, what is the first thing that goes in a budget crunch...training.

Very few managers receive any training in building a respectful working relationship with the people who do the work and build the relationships with the customers.

Managers spend more time on the business and small percentage on coaching and motivating each person who is part of their team.

Managing employees is a skill...a combination of a business knowledge, problem solving abilities, motivator, and above all...a strong listener.

[Paul Hebert]

Thanks for the comments Pat... for some reason companies seem to think of employees as the one resource that is easy to get, easy to maintain and easy to replace. And the truth is - they are the hardest to evaluate at the onset, difficult and time consuming to maintain and very difficult to replace.

You'd think the amount of time and energy spent on this area would be more. Companies spend much more on training a maintenance when they buy expensive and difficult to operate machinery than the do on their employees.