4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

The Importance of Learning to the new “Employment Contract”

When we doing our research before designing the Insightlink employee model back in 2001, we could see that the level of commitment employees feel toward their jobs and the places they work had to play an important part. So important, in fact, that we ended up identifying “Commitment” as one of the 4Cs!

At the same time, though, it is clear that we are undergoing a fundamental shift in the meaning of employee commitment. Not that long ago, many employees joined an organization expecting to make their career there. They expected the organization to give them opportunities to develop their skills, to increase their responsibilities and to advance through the ranks. In return, they rewarded the organization with loyalty and did what needed to be done to ensure corporate success.

These days, the idea of lifetime job security and retiring with a gold watch are long gone. Individual employees need to play a more active role in their development and career planning, instead of leaving this planning up to their employer. In return, employers are looking to increase the increase the employability of its workforce by investing in continuous skill development and encouraging them to use those skills.

The 4th C of Employee Engagement is Convey. Employees need to receive constructive and positive feedback on a regular basis if they are to succeed personally and feel passionate and committed to their organizations. It is a manager’s job to convey specific, objective feedback as frequently as possible to help their employees improve their performance and keep morale within their team high.

Justifying an Employee Survey

There are many different reasons for conducting an employee survey. Some of these reasons include:

• Providing your organization with a fresh perspective on attitudes and opinions about policies and operations,
• Measuring how well your employees are "on board” with management’s mission and strategy,
• Giving your staff members a voice in helping improve the work environment, and
• Finding out how your organization performs compared with that of similar organizations.

Keep in mind that your employees have to deal with everyday front-line problems in every corner of your business. In fact, employees at all levels are the key to effective performance improvement – they really know how things work and are best placed to identify and resolve the problems which are holding your organization back. If you can successfully engage your staff in driving performance improvement, you can create a catalyst for change across the entire organization. Their skills, knowledge, experience and creativity can be effective tools in assessing your work environment, so that your operations can become faster, cheaper, more efficient, more effective and more customer focused.

Clarity is a Cornerstone to Employee Engagement 

Let’s be clear: organizations thrive when they have a clear vision of their goals, values and principles. People need to know why their organization exists so they have a reason to give their enthusiastic support. When organizations are clear about what needs to get done, who needs to do it and how it should get done then everyone can pull together for a common cause.

Bu having a clear vision isn’t enough. It is essential that this vision is communicated clearly and regularly to the entire workforce. Ensure that goals and decisions are consistent with your vision, then remind your management team and your employees that their actions also need to be consistent with this same vision.

Workplace Action Is Critical

One of the most important components of any employee survey project is create an effective action plan (or plans) that will address the top opportunities for improvement and/or ensure that you maintain the strengths that you have. This is especially true when you lead an organization-wide survey of all employees.

Not taking action on your survey findings will communicate to your employees that you really don’t care about their attitudes and opinions. Any suggestion like this cannot but hurt employee morale and, at the very least, will likely reduce your participation rate in any future surveys,

Weak Morale Hampers Productivity

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.” I’m sure you’ve seen this sign in many workplaces – maybe even your own! Employee morale is one of those topics that most HR practitioners recognized as important but there’s not a lot of guidance on how to improve it.

Here at Insightlink, we know it’s a problem from our annual employee benchmark study of U.S. employees. Our 2014 results show that:

• Just one-half of all employees agree that their own level of morale is excellent or very good, and
• Only four in ten feel the same about the level of morale in their organization as a whole.

These findings are important because low levels of morale affect organizations in many different ways, including negatively impacting product and service quality, recruitment success, employee retention and customer relations.

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Career Advancement Contributes to Employee Engagement

Career advancement is the second ‘C’ of employee engagement. It’s impact on an employee’s attitude towards their organization cannot be underestimated and has been proven to contribute to employees feeling a deep connection to their place of work. When employees think they have a future with their current organization, that there are opportunities for career advancement or career enhancement, then they are more likely to approach their jobs with passion and pride.

Employee engagement can best be summarized as a dynamic partnership in which employees bond with their organization and with each other through shared understanding and a common purpose. See the ten steps to building engagement in this infographic.

The Value of Employee Engagement

In recent years, many organizations have made an effort to improve working conditions in ways that would allow employees to actually enjoy their work. These positive changes are often in response to research suggesting that, as employee engagement improves, so does organizational performance.

Job satisfaction and employee engagement are related, but separate, measures of the vitality of an organization’s work environment. They tend to be correlated and many of the changes in a workplace that improve one measure will improve the other as well. This does not, however, mean that they are identical, which is why we recommend measuring both.

Simply stated, job satisfaction summarizes an internal emotional state that employees may or may not feel. It is possible for an employee to feel quite satisfied with their job but not feel a strong sense of loyalty to their organization or see the need to innovate, be creative or give other types of discretionary effort to their work. This means that job satisfaction is a foundation on which engagement can be built, but it is not the same as engagement.

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