This is the final installment of a five part series on employee engagement that has identified five ways to make employees love you, promote your business and stay engaged for the long-term. This, and the previous four articles are based upon a webinar conducted by Dr. Gary Rhoads, loyalty and engagement expert.

How do you build engaged employees? In previous articles February, March, April and May we discussed increasing employee passion factors, which are defined as the various job events, practices, or procedures that are rewarded and supported on the job that makes the work life of an employee more meaningful and fulfilling.

The first four steps to increasing passion factors and employee engagement are:

1. Reinforcing the positive

2. Recognizing the spillover effect

3. Managing the frontline managers

4. Culture as a passion factor

The final step is Employee Recognition.

Developing a foundation of employee recognition is not just a nice thing to do, it is a necessary to help employees know that management appreciates the contributions of the company’s most important assets.

American philosopher William James once said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” Truth is all employees want to be recognized for their efforts and their individual successes, which benefit the organization. An effective employee recognition program does not need to be expensive or extravagant. A simple program that encourages management recognizing employee contributions, either in private or in front of his/her peers, will provide the positive affirmation and acknowledgement that people crave. Dr. Rhoads mentioned that successful employee recognition programs have six elements:

1. Encourage healthy competition among employees

2. Have desirable rewards

3. Research, research, research—understand needs of employees before launching program

4. Provide recognition from senior management

5. Provide personalized recognition.

6. Be consistent

Once the program is initiated, it is critical that companies also measure the results and then use the data to make improvements.

When implemented together, employers can help to increase the passion factors, which will impact the way employees perform. When employees strongly identify with roles that are meaningful, they become emotionally engaged with their employers and their work. And as we have learned, emotionally engaged employees equal emotionally engaged customers.

On May 7-9 in Deer Valley, Utah, Allegiance, customers and business leaders enjoyed the second annual engagement summit featuring keynote presentations by representative from JD Power and Associates and CustomerThink, and from engagement and loyalty expert, Dr. Gary Rhoads.

The Summit was a huge success and presentations from the keynote speakers echoed the theme of engaging with employees and customers as a way to survive and thrive in a weakening economy.

• Bob Thompson of CustomerThink Corp. cautioned companies to avoid being the ‘date from hell’ in customer relationships, always talking about themselves and not listening to customers. Thompson presented research that showed that positive customer experiences and engagement drive loyalty and growth.
• Dr. Gary Rhoads and Dr. David Whitlark of Brigham Young University pointed out that companies waste money on customer loyalty programs if they don’t match the actual service delivered by employees. They presented data to demonstrate how measurement of employee loyalty and engagement can act as a leading indicator and predictor of customer loyalty and engagement.
• Bob Caruso of JD Power and Associates stated that the secret ingredient to customer satisfaction is people. The customer experience is linked to the employee experience, and leadership plays a critical role in driving customer engagement. He also presented studies that show that companies who focused on increasing customer satisfaction significantly increased shareholder value.

Read the entire wrap-up release. (PDF file)

Allegiance has worked with thousands of companies helping them to deploy customer and employee feedback systems. As we have worked with these companies that span size and industry, we have identified five common things among successful companies as it relates to engagement. Over the course of the next five issues of the Allegiance newsletter, we will reveal what these five common things are and provide some insight into why they are so important to business today.

The first thing that successful companies do is, they collect more feedback.

Companies have replaced their paper-based or other traditional feedback mechanisms with automated, online solutions from Allegiance. Now, customers and employees have a convenient and confidential solution for submitting their feedback, and these companies are able to better manage, measure and quickly act upon the feedback they receive.

The feedback serves as a lifeline to the voice of the customer and voice of the employee. Companies that receive more feedback have a better idea of what they can do to help their customers and employees. They can use the data to make more strategic business decisions that can help improve employee and customer retention, which will ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line.

Next month: Willingness to quantify engagement

Do you have a best practices case study to share about how the increase in customer and employee feedback has helped your business? If so, contact marketing@allegiance.com. Allegiance can work with you to quantify the benefits of engagement to your organization, put together a case study and provide free awareness and PR around your story.

Read the article in Talent Management on Six Steps to Creating an Ethical Culture featuring Allegiance CTO, Greg Heaps.