Quality Service Marketing

Memo to Senior Management: Take Care of Your People

I found this great quote from Dr. Judith M. Bardwick:

“When people are perceived as a cost and not a resource, when they are treated as a liability and not an asset, when no one seems to know or care that they are there, they don’t work well, and they don’t stay.”

Who are these ‘people?’

They’re your employees … your contractors, vendors, and consultants … your partners … and ultimately your brand advocates or - depending on how you treated them - your brand adversaries.

Breaking Up (with Clients) is Hard to Do

Self-employed consultants can’t risk becoming disengaged from their client work, especially if they want to maintain their professional brand; i.e., reputation and credibility. They can, however, voluntarily leave a client. While this is a viable option, it's not easily made. Consider this situation that a colleague described to me.

“I quit my long term client – even in this terrible market. Doing projects with them was ruining my health and after seven years of various engagements, the last one was just too much to tolerate and I left. They have become a horrible entity – not paying bills, imposing a terrible climate of fear and austerity on their people, making consultants and contractors beg for seriously eroded wages …

Its employees have also felt this pain, exist in an environment of fear and anger, and are nowhere near the can-do proud enthusiastic workforce I was introduced to when I first started consulting with this client. The company imposed extreme austerity measures on its workforce … while sitting on huge reserve assets and bragging to Wall Street about how they could weather this recession just fine.

I am proud of myself for quitting. I’ve had other small projects over the last several years, mostly  at this client. But now I need to learn to do something else ..."

In my own 20+ years experience as a consultant, I know how difficult it is to walk away from a client, especially in such a tight market. (To those of you considering the 'glamour' of going solo, keep in mind: everyday you’re self-employed, you wake up unemployed!) So I’m proud of my friend for having the courage to leave and preserve her mental & physical health, despite the economic uncertainty.

Fellow consultants who care to share: what did it take for you to voluntarily leave a client?

"The Power of Federal Employee Engagement" - Not Just for Feds

Even the U.S. government is focused on employee engagement these days. A study by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board explored the link between employee engagement and outcomes, and the results confirm “employee engagement has a strong, positive impact on organizational outcomes in the Federal sector.”

The study found six drivers of Federal employee engagement:

• Pride in one’s work and workplace
• Satisfaction with leadership
• The opportunity to perform well at work
• A positive work environment
• Satisfaction with received recognition
• Prospects for future personal and professional growth.

The federal government competes in the same labor market as the private sector and is similarly challenged to improve outcomes within budget constraints. Despite differences in the public vs. private workplace, ALL managers can learn from the insights and recommendations found in this study.

You can find the special report The Power of Federal Employee Engagement. [Source: the Employee Engagement Network]

Employee Engagement Today (and Tomorrow)

I was recently asked to speak to a management group. When told the topic was “How to Engage Employee’s in Today’s Economy,” I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. It’s a popular subject these days, but seriously, how is engaging people now any different than engaging them in good times?

I’m not talking about HR-focused firms looking for new ways to better engage their employees. What gets me are those companies for whom employee engagement is a totally new concept. You know the ones where “our people are our greatest asset” is mere rhetoric (by the company) and wishful thinking (by the employees).

These companies are primarily interested in learning about engagement because they’re looking for a quick fix. But when it comes to effectively engaging employees – by means of a workplace that fosters open communications, trust, respect, and leadership – there is no instant remedy. As they’ll learn when the economy improves and their employee turnover rate soars.

Ever the optimist, however, I figure better late than never … maybe this time they’ll learn.

New Workshop on Internal Branding and Internal Marketing

I’m really excited to be developing a new program with my colleague and internal branding expert, Debra Semans. We’re presenting Internal Branding and Internal Marketing: Strategic Integration for Market Leadership as part of AMA’s Spotlight Forum series (an “intense day focused on topics confronting marketers today”) in Houston on November 13, 2009.

Note: An earlier post comparing & contrasting internal marketing with internal branding is one of my most frequently visited posts in the five years I’ve been blogging.

In this new workshop, Debra and I will share insights and tips on how to make internal branding and internal marketing work respectively. We’ll also cover how elements of each can be integrated to better engage employees - the “face” of your brand and organization - to meet marketing and organizational goals.

The more I work on the program’s content, the more I realize how timely this topic is for marketing, HR, and business leaders dealing with these challenging times. It’s also an untimely topic in the sense that both internal marketing and internal branding should not be treated as the “strategy du jour.” Successful companies have been applying these approaches all along as an integral part of their organization culture and operations, not just an interim campaign.

Hope you’ll be able to join Debra and me in Houston in a few weeks for this exciting new learning event!

New Study Confirms Employee Engagement's Positive Impact

The latest in employee engagement research continues to confirm its bottom line benefits through improvements in customer satisfaction/loyalty and employee retention.

The Aberdeen Group studied more than 300 organizations with engagement initiatives to benchmark best-in-class performance. A complimentary copy of Aberdeen's report, Beyond Satisfaction: Engaging Employees to Retain Customers, is available through Oct. 2, 2009.

Employee Engagement Gets a Big Boost from the UK: The MacLeod Review

I’m back from my brief blog break and wanted to share these links to a major new employee engagement report recently released by the UK.

Amazing: a major government commissions an independent report on employee engagement’s impact on business practice, and then it provides open access to the information! The official report is titled Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance through Employee Engagement by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke.

Here are two great sources that summarize this important new report:

• David Zinger, founder of the Employee Engagement Network (where I first learned about the report)
• Lee Smith, employee communications specialist and British blogger.

(Thanks, guys!)

Free Seminar: "Recovering from the Recession Hangover"

Bon Mot Communications is offering a free audio seminar with a great title: Recovering from the Recession Hangover: 5 Strategies to Get Your Team Back on Track with Solution Focused Leadership. It’s scheduled for Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 2 PM EST, and registration is limited, so I wanted to let you know about it now.

I’m a big fan of the Solution Focused approach since I learned about it a number of years ago from my colleague, Alan Kay. That’s why I’m excited about attending this seminar.

I know business tends to slow down in the summer, so it’s a great time to invest an hour and learn about solution focused leadership.

Re-energize Employees and Organizations

As a follow up to my recent series Re-Charging Employee Morale, here’s an approach that helps employees re-energize themselves and their organizations.

“To effectively re-energize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated-and able-to bring more of themselves to work everyday. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.”

The excerpt is from the article:  Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy of The Energy Project, a consulting firm focused on building “sustainable high performance cultures by teaching people to manage their energy rather than their time” -- the latter being a finite resource. Their approach helps employees better understand and better manage four energy sources:

• physical – involving nutrition, fitness, and sleep/rest
• emotional – the ability to cultivate positive emotions
• mental – being mindful and maintaining focus, including dealing with multiple distractions
• “human spirit” – a clear sense of purpose and meaning in one’s work and life.

Check out The Energy Project’s blog: Changing the Way the World Works to learn more.

Judging by their client list, The Energy Project has helped many organizations and their employees. If it’s unlikely that your company will find itself on that list, don’t wait … start by exploring how you can better manage your energy.

Re-Charging Employee Morale: Organizational Tips

This wraps up my series of posts in which I feature coaching tips from business consultant-coach-authors Dawn Lennon, Phil Gerbyshak, and Michelle Gall, who graciously shared their suggestions for coping in this chaotic climate.

Leadership and Performance Improvement Coach, Dawn Lennon, who is the author of Business Fitness: The Power to Succeed - Your Way, gives us an organizational perspective in her response to my question:

In organizations where employees are experiencing low morale, low motivation, general malaise, etc. – due to workplace pressures and current economic conditions – what do you suggest to help people re-energize themselves and their co-workers? 

“Relentless negative messages are suffocating. When people hear or read nothing but discouraging news day after day in the media, at staff meetings, in company e-mails, and at the water cooler, they develop a feeling of powerlessness that can sap even the strongest spirit. The truth is that the glass is always half full and half empty at the same time. How we see the contents of the glass determines how we proceed. When the spirit of our employees flags, management needs to look at the messages it’s sending.

“Employees get energy, motivation, and optimism from a clear understanding of the state of the business (how it’s doing financially, what the market needs, how costs impact operations) and what the business needs them to do to make a difference.

“People want to feel in control of their work life. They don’t want to feel like they are sitting in wait for something awful to happen. They don’t want to live in dread of unseen inevitabilities. Employers owe their employees the information they need to make good choices each day about what they do, how they work, and what their options are.

“Businesses that see a pall falling over their employees need to do three things:

“Deliver a balanced (upside and downside) state of the business message face to face to employees—Use the existing leadership (executives, managers, and first line supervisors) to communicate these messages in ways that connect with employees and allow for candid questions and answers.

“Develop specific performance initiatives with each employee that aligns his/her work with the needs of the business—Give employees a clear understanding of how their contributions are helping to drive the success of the business by having each person meet with his/her supervisor to set priorities.

“Meet with work group employees together each week to review progress—Build a sense of team camaraderie where each person’s efforts are applauded in the context of the broader needs of the business. Reinforce the state of the business messages, showcasing how the positives are beginning to impact the negatives.

“The engagement of team effort around a central challenge is a strong antidote to malaise. It brings fresh air into the workplace, builds optimism through shared involvement, and helps people to focus less on their individual concerns and more on the power of the team. Together we generally feel stronger and safer than we do alone.”

Thanks, Dawn!