Share Your Financials to Boost Employee Engagement and Increase Customer Retention
If you’re searching for ways to improve employee engagement, you’ll find lots of laundry lists of advice. But the statistics suggest that following such advice is harder than it looks—some 70% of U.S. workers say they don’t feel engaged on the job, a number that hasn’t changed much in recent years.
We have a different way of thinking about engagement, because we have a different idea of what it is.
Our approach begins with a question: Who do you think is more engaged in the business, the farmer or the hired hand? The store owner or the clerk behind the counter? The answers are obvious, but they raise an equally obvious objection. Not everyone can be an owner.
But the objection misses the essence of ownership. It isn’t just that owners are in charge. It’s that they’re players. They’re in the game. They know the rules. They act, and they watch the numbers to find out whether their actions were on track or misguided. If they win the game, they know there’ll be a payoff. Most people think of engagement in individual terms—feeling fulfilled by the task at hand, wanting to do a good job. We see engagement as being part of a team that’s competing to win.
It’s surprisingly easy to generate this kind of engagement among employees when you make the economics of the business come alive by sharing some key financial numbers. It’s an open-book approach: people begin to watch these indicators. Then they figure out how to move them in the right direction.
Higher employee engagement goes beyond the walls of the company – it reaches the customer. Right Management conducted a major study of engagement that supports this connection. While only 51% of customers dealing with disengaged employees strongly agreed that they thought highly of the company’s products and services, 88% strongly agreed when interacting with an engaged employee.
We’ve witnessed similar results at many other companies that follow the open-book path to engagement. A designer at a D.C.–area design/build firm says she notices “everyone caring more and being more accountable and taking responsibility.” The CEO of a midsized manufacturing company told us, “I don’t have employees in my plant anymore. I have entrepreneurs who are looking to find ways to make more money.”
When employees think and act like owners, they get the bigger-picture significance of each customer relationship. Customer retention soars.
Join SMEI for a webinar on Employee Engagement and Customer Retention on October 9, 2014.
Bill Fotsch of Open-Book Coaching has worked with nearly 400 companies over the past 20+ years (including several larger organizations such as Southwest Airlines and Capital One, BHP Billiton and many smaller, privately held businesses), helping them develop a systematic approach to open-book implementation and success.
Bill has presented in varied speaking roles at numerous functions, including being a guest lecturer at University of Chicago Business School, and conducts webinar presentations on a regular basis.
