Now that we’ve taken a deep dive into employee engagement and the enormous potential available through a commitment to facilitating such engagement, let’s take a look at the benefits this will produce for your customers. According to Gallup's research, when organisations successfully engage both their customers AND their employees, they experience a 240% boost in performance-related business outcomes. Yes, that is a zero after the 24, not a typo – 240%.
Front-line employees represent a particularly important opportunity to fulfill the mission and purpose of your organisation during their direct interactions with existing and potential customers. Given everything that we've covered about engagement so far, the question then becomes, how do you know the best methodology, or process, to implement within your organisation to make sure that employees are aligned to your brand, and engaged in their work, as well as with your customers?
Gallup’s research illustrates that few employees are aligned with or empowered to deliver the core elements of their organisation’s brand identity and promise. Therefore, executives must start by engaging their employees and then taking these steps to help their workers become effective brand ambassadors.
Gallup recommends the following benchmarks for enabling your organisation to become an employer of choice, as well as giving you competitive advantage based on outstanding internal alignment, cohesion and engagement:
It is worth repeating that only 13% of the world’s workers are engaged in their jobs. Given the proven links between employee engagement and financial outcomes, if organisations worldwide could find a way to double the number of engaged employees, it would dramatically improve their balance sheets and change the world’s entire economic trajectory for the better.
In the final Blog for this series on engagement, next week we will outline what it is that the best do differently. We will offer Gallup’s recommendations for emulating market leaders as a means to joining them in the lofty heights of employee and customer engagement. Discover how to ensure that engagement levels are high, that employees enjoy their work and operate in a cohesive and harmonious manner, that customers are happy brand ambassadors, and that the balance sheet reflects all of this with robust profits.
Those are some pretty great reasons to make employee engagement a top priority for your organisation in 2015.
Credit: The image used in this blog is taken from Galllup's State Of The Global Workforce Report 2013.