Why do Employees Fear Workplace Engagement?

We have in our “interesting read file” a great article, The 3 Fears Employees Have About Engagement — and How to Confront Them. The article was written by Chris Powell of TLNT | Talent Management and HR. It was written so well that we wanted to share the main gist of it with all of you. Chris hit the right points about employee engagement, so we figured we wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. Here’s a bit of what Chris had to say.

______________________________________________________________

Employee engagement initiatives don’t have to be stressful. Too many times, we’ve seen organizations dragging their feet on engagement work. And we get it; change is hard, and a new engagement initiative can mean big changes in culture and operations at an organization. But, those changes result in very good things — like better retention, more satisfied employees, higher productivity, and a healthier bottom line.

In many cases, the source of stress is actually unfounded fears. Here are the most common fears we see at the companies we’ve worked with, along with some pointers on how to successfully manage them.

1. Fear of the unknown

If you’re considering an employee engagement initiative, it’s probably because you believe people are disengaged at your organization. You’re losing employees or productivity is down. But what if it’s even worse than you think it is? What if you survey employees and the results spell out exactly what they don’t like about working there?

For many leaders, contemplating those questions are a fast track to stress. They get frozen by fear of what they don’t know and what might be uncovered by an employee survey. And that simply compounds the problem, especially if any announcement about improving engagement was made to the employee population.

The reality: It’s impossible to manage engagement without knowing your baseline. It may be an eye-opener to see results from a survey, but you can’t change without it. You know you want to improve engagement at your organization, so keep in mind that knowing the specifics will help you manage it more effectively.

2. Fear of irrelevance

Some HR departments hold off on engagement initiatives because they may think that employee engagement is a passing fad or another box to check off. They may resist implementing a change because they think in the next year or two there will be another trend to chase after.

The reality: Employee engagement initiatives get proven results. When Gallup performed a meta-analysis on its Q12 measure, it found that engaged organizations perform better. It describes the relationship between engagement and performance as “substantial” and that this relationship is applicable across organizations.

Employee engagement represents an opportunity to coordinate employee attitudes and business goals for long-term success.

3. Fear of extra work

Once an organization commits to doing an employee engagement survey and gets the results, it faces a critical question: Who will do the work to improve engagement? Not doing anything is even worse than not surveying in the first place; it only gets employees’ hopes up that something might change, and when it doesn’t, they can be even more disengaged.

The reality: The results you get from your employee survey will provide a path you can follow to boost engagement, but remember that the path is made up of many small steps. It’s impossible to change engagement levels overnight, and there’s no reason to try to do so. Managers are often on the front line when it comes to instituting engagement efforts, so find ways to educate and empower them to take on engagement-boosting efforts as part of their work.

Thinking about your business objectives and the role employees play in achieving them can help ease some of the stress around engagement. An engagement initiative can help identify things managers need to know to drive performance and keep them in front of problems before they happen.

Employee engagement is not a switch you can turn on. It’s a series of small steps that the entire organization must take over time to achieve change. The process doesn’t have to be hard; it simply takes a commitment from people at all levels to make changes in the way the company operates internally.

__________________________________________________________

At Tweed-Weber, we make implementing an Employee Engagement Survey easy. We can help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).

Can You Hear Me?

By Sharon Danks, Vice President, Tweed-Weber, Inc.

I recently had a brutally painful customer experience with a telephone service company. The amount of repeated efforts I had to go through to resolve an atypical, yet fairly simple issue was just “ridonculous.” To be more accurate, that would be ridonculous x 100. Suffice it say, they will never get our business again, and I’m just hoping the twitch I get every time I hear their name isn’t obvious and/or permanent. The overall experience left me asking the question, “How did the string of people I talked to throughout the process of trying to get resolution not hear me?” I was extremely clear, both verbally and in writing, about what our issue was and how we needed it to be resolved. However, not one person took the time to understand the details, nor did anyone care about what I was experiencing as a customer. The funny thing is, at every turn, I think each one of them honestly felt like they were doing the best they could to help given the “authorization” constraints placed on them. When each of them passed me off to someone else, I really think they felt good about their efforts to assist.

To add insult to injury, after months of lunacy, when the issue was finally resolved, we received an email sent automatically when your “case number” is closed out, asking, “How was your experience working with us?” Really?

The point of sharing my sad tale is to highlight this as a classic example of a company with a process for surveying customers that’s not connected in any way to the reality of the customer’s experience and/or to the touch points the customer has with the organization. If you’re doing customer surveys for the sake of saying you do them, and are not making your employees who deal with customers accountable for the experience and/or immediate problem resolution, then your process is fatally flawed.

The best way to gather customer feedback is through a proactive process that makes your customers feel valued versus a reactive process that customers easily recognize as an afterthought. All of us know when something is being done half-heartedly, and if your customers believe that is your attitude towards them, it’s only a matter of time before the result of that is lost business. All employees in the organization should be on-board with understanding how a customer’s experience impacts the bottom line, positively or negatively, and their role in providing customers with unrivaled service.

Conducting a customer perception survey on a regular basis should be an engaging, ongoing, exciting, meaningful activity that helps shape your organization’s products, services, and processes. It’s a chance to partner one-on-one with your customers to learn about the state of your organization as viewed from the outside. Bottom line: Is the opinion of anyone else more important than your customers when it comes to identifying ways to improve their experience so you can grow your business?

If you would like to know how effective your current customer survey process is, or if you’d like to be proactive in starting a new customer survey initiative, give us a call. We can help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).

One last thing: “Ridonculous.” From the movie Nemo. A must see.

Create an Employee "Think Tank"

The saying, “perception is reality” is never more true when observing employees of an organization relative to how they perform and interact with each other on a daily basis. Having a clear and common understanding of employee perceptions offers enormous opportunities for ideas and improvement in the future. Have you ever wondered how to implement an employee survey to help foster high regard and recognition for employees’ thoughts and opinions, and to help them feel like a valuable part of the team? We can help.  

 

There are different types of employee surveys that help to obtain feedback, and the goal of each of those surveys depends on the questions you want to ask.

 

Employee Climate Survey

 

The typical survey we conduct for our clients is an online Employee Perception Survey, also called a “climate survey.” For this kind of employee feedback initiative, you are trying to understand how employees feel about working at the organization. The following categories are normally used as a basis for asking questions:

• Job perception
• Work environment
• Opportunities for involvement and work improvement
• Management support
• Compensation and career advancement
• Education and training
• Overall understanding of (your organization)

Conducting a climate survey is essential in your efforts to identify areas for internal improvement. Retaining employees is a huge issue for most organizations today, and doing all that you can to create a work environment that fosters respect, teamwork, and loyalty is not only the right thing to do, but a smart one as well. A high level of employee retention positively impacts the bottom line.

 

Employee Think Tank Survey

 

Another type of survey that is gaining speed with our clients is an “Employee Think Tank” survey. For this kind of feedback initiative, you are trying to tap into the minds of your employees by asking more strategic questions that could identify potential opportunities for the company based on what they see and experience at work. The following are some questions to ask employees in this type of survey (just to name a few):

• In our current strategic plan, XYZ actions are described as critical elements for reaching our long-term growth plan. Which one do you feel is most critical to our growth in the future, and why?
• What specific factors do you believe influence customers’ purchasing decisions relative to the products/services we offer?
• What are the top three things you believe customers need most from us? 
• What is one idea you have for making it more convenient for customers to do business with us?
• If there is one area in which you feel we have lost the most ground over the past two years, what would that be, and why?
• What factors do you believe stand in the way of our overall growth?
• What customer service/support activity do you think we should offer to satisfy customer needs/demands, but currently we do not provide?
• Overall, what should we STOP doing or offering because you feel it adds little to no value at all to customers?
• If you became President of our organization tomorrow, what’s the one thing you would do immediately to increase sales, and why?

You would be surprised and thrilled with the depth of thinking and feedback these kinds of questions spark in employees (especially those employees in positions that have direct contact with customers and the marketplace). Because they view the organization from different angles, they provide a holistic snapshot that you can feel confident covers all bases within your operations. Implementing an Employee Think Tank survey will help you see things through a different lens that will help ensure you are not missing the obvious when developing strategies and planning for future growth.

 

How much insight, knowledge, and wisdom is being untapped within your organization? An Employee Think Tank survey will help you find out. We can help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). 

Have You Spotted New Customer Trends?

While reading the February issue of Quirks Magazine, I stumbled upon the article “4 customer experience trends for 2014,” and it got me thinking about how with each New Year, new trends are tracked and researched and the things of 2013 are no longer “cool.” This is true with every industry, especially fashion, which turns around new styles each season (sometimes a couple times a season). But how do these new trends of 2014 affect you?

A customer’s experience is the make-or-break for their loyalty with a company. According to the study from New York customer experience management company, LivePerson, consumers are willing to wait an average of 76 seconds for customer service support when visiting a website. That’s 76 seconds for a customer to see if they like, or don’t like, your company.  

Because you only have 76 seconds for a customer to decide your fate, there are some steps you can take to improve the outcome and maintain customers. 

The first is there is always room for improvement. No matter how good one person is at something, there can always be tweaks to make it spectacular. The same goes with any company. In today’s society, consumers are quick to go somewhere else if a deal, service, or product is better – it’s the name of the game. According to Anurag Wadehra, blogger for LivePerson, 33 percent of consumers struggle to help or locate customer service, whereas 49 percent of consumers find websites to be difficult to navigate. By stepping-up your game, those 76 seconds can be a life-changer.

The second is brand trust and loyalty. People tend to stay with or go with companies that have a good reputation and can provide a good quality service. With that said, 78 percent of consumers agree that they will be loyal to a company that provides real-time, one-on-one support. 

The third is, speed and efficiency, especially with our fast-paced society today. Everyone expects to have everything at lightning speed, no matter what the situation. This is especially true with consumers. About three-quarters stated speed and efficiency were the most important factors in creating a great experience.

The last, but not the least, is high-impact moments. How does this affect you? Consumers are looking for anything to help them during their times of need, especially when navigating a website. If you provide the right support, it will be a “high-impact” moment because of the willingness of your company to help them. According to the Quirk’s article, 35 percent of consumers say the actual moment of purchase is when they need the most help. Does your company have an easy, turn-key check out process?

Though this article is driven by trends in the online sector, I thought it was important to write about it because our society is so focused on technology and the impact of this is huge when it comes to companies. It is important to come into the 21st century and adapt to the changes popularized by Gen-Y, since one day they are going to be your biggest customer. As a Gen-Y myself, I know how important it is to have an easy process from navigating a site to check out. I want it to go smoothly and efficiently, and any hiccup makes me go elsewhere. This is true for mostly everyone of my generation because we are used to having everything at the tips of our fingers. How is your company dealing with the shift in technology? Do you think your company is up-to-speed on all of the latest social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging? Maybe it’s time to analyze the inner-workings of your company and see what your employees are saying about this. 

Let Tweed-Weber, Inc. help your company find its strengths and weaknesses to make your “New Years’” resolutions a reality. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). “With every new year, comes a new you.” We have all heard that saying each time another year flies by, but now with the end of the first quarter quickly approaching, it’s time to look to back and see if the new year really did bring a new you.

About the author: Gretchen Koch has been with Tweed-Weber, Inc. since 2012 and serves as Operations Manager. She oversees office processes and provides quality control on all market research reports and strategic planning documents.

BE SURE: Customer Research from Tweed-Weber

Customer feedback. We’re told how essential it is to a successful business. At Tweed-Weber, we absolutely support that notion. Here are some common questions we get asked about obtaining customer feedback:

• How can we engage our customers in a way that will encourage them to provide us with candid perceptions about our performance?
• How do we obtain customer input that is objective?
• How do we know what to ask our customers about us?
• How do we obtain customer input that is easy to understand?
• How do we make the customer feedback we receive actionable?
• How do we obtain customer input in a way that is most cost-effective?
• How do we get satisfaction ratings we can benchmark over time in an effort to track our progress?
• How do we impress our customers with a genuine effort to understand their business issues?
• How can we identify specific opportunities for increased sales within our current customer base?
• How do we do a customer survey when we really don’t know how?

Many companies still mail a paper-and-pencil survey to gather feedback from their customers, thinking it will meet their most basic requirements for gathering their input. However, every completed paper-and-pencil survey that you receive represents a missed opportunity to have strengthened that customer relationship on a more personal level. Mail surveys are most effective when you are mailing to an enormous audience, like in consumer research versus B2B research, because the number of surveys sent out will hopefully garner a large enough sample that is returned to be meaningful.

For B2B customer surveys, we highly recommend online surveys or telephone interviews. Online surveys are more engaging, and the entire process of online surveys can be managed, implemented, and tracked in a much more targeted and efficient manner. Customers also love incentives, so online surveys with incentives can help increase response rates.

We believe telephone interviews offer the best way to obtain in-depth customer feedback. If your customers were willing to take the time to complete a survey without you being present, just imagine what they would be willing to share if they were asked purposeful questions by a person who was offering them his/her undivided attention. The amount of feedback that can be gathered and interpreted from telephone interviews is far more fruitful than other methodologies.

In the past, we've talked about survey methodologies. Every research method has its appropriate place and time, and we invite you to learn more about how you can gather customer feedback in the most effective manner. At Tweed-Weber, we specialize in designing and implementing customer surveys, so we can help you create a process that’s right for you. Listening to the voice of your customers will help you Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).

Are You Hearing Everything Your Customer Says?

"There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." – Sam Walton

Certainly, knowing what your customers are thinking is critical to the success of any business, regardless of whether it specializes in straight-to-consumer or business-to-business products and services. We’ve written extensively about the importance of customer satisfaction here, here, and here; the synergy between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction; and how one company, in particular, has been using its customer satisfaction research to improve service.

A recent article by Gerry Katz in Quirk’s Marketing Research (“Hijacked again!” December 2013, pp. 38-42) caught our eye, as it describes three of the more popular viewpoints relative to the “voice of the customer.” VOC, as it’s colloquially known, can be made to mean just about anything, according to those Katz calls “the stretchers”:

The Stretchers take VOC well beyond its original definition. For many, VOC has become a euphemism – it sounds better than “market research” or what we once called customer satisfaction measurement (and its more recent incarnation, the Net Promoter Score) and customer relationship management (CRM).

Katz notes that some, but not all, of those who use VOC to mean customer satisfaction and CRM interchangeably often downplay the synergy between the two methods. They use them as a sort of report card, a tool to indicate where they’ve been or how well they’ve done. They view it as a snapshot of the past rather than a springboard into the pool of discussion on future planning. Katz uses the image of a child who brings home a failing grade in reading: some families automatically blame the teacher or the methods used to grade the child rather than asking the more fundamental question, “Why [emphasis ours] can’t Johnny read?”

As these two methods are necessarily symbiotic, any customer research that focuses on just one of them is deficient. Yes, knowing that your customers rate their collective satisfaction with your services as a 3.7 on a 1-to-5 scale is valuable, but knowing exactly why that is the case (and why you were not rated a 4 or 5) is infinitely more useful and actionable.

Learning why is a hallmark of Tweed-Weber’s research capabilities. This sort of cohesion yields the deepest, richest, and most action-oriented results, speaking truth to numbers and backing up customers’ perceptions with data. Seeing the full picture reveals emotional connections and underlying motivations to the data, helping in validating and confirming insight on an emotional level and, ultimately, in providing confident recommendations.

If you’re wondering if customer research is right for you, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). As winter (hopefully) winds down and spring arrives, new growth begins. Now is the time to notice the changes within your industry and within your customer base, and remember that with every change comes a new beginning. No one can guarantee certainty, but market research can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More.

The Five Sources of Cost Advantage

There are five commonly recognized sources of cost advantage – people, material/supplies, processes/systems, facilities, and capital. It is not necessary to focus on all of them in order to experience the benefits of being the lowest cost producer in your industry; any one could be enough. However, by achieving a true cost advantage in more than one source, you further ensure your company’s success.

 

Now, let’s explore each of these five sources and determine the relationship it has on your business.

 

People

 

Many organizations boast that their people are their most important asset. While this may be true, people can also represent the most significant cost to a company when you shift from the balance sheet to the operating statement.

Companies do not become the lowest cost producers by paying their people the lowest wages and benefits possible. They become the lowest cost producers by leading and managing their employees to performance levels that exceed those of their competition. To do this, they continuously focus on enhancing the skills of their people. They create highly flexible employees who are capable of meeting the demands of an ever-changing marketplace.

 

Lowest cost companies create highly disciplined teams who understand their real competition is outside of their organization, not inside. They: 

• tell their people what to do
• support them in their efforts to do it
• measure how well they do it
• reward and/or discipline based on their measurements

Materials/Supplies

All companies use materials and supplies to produce their products or perform the services that their customers buy. Lowest cost companies do not simply focus on the lowest unit price of materials or supplies, they establish purchasing practices that result in the lowest total cost for these materials and supplies.

 

This distinction is essential because the lowest unit price for a particular purchased product may not be the lowest total cost for the same material. Lowest cost companies identify and separate their strategic purchases from their low-risk purchases. They then align their purchasing resources to ensure that strategic material purchases receive the level of attention they deserve. They understand and track their total purchasing costs and work hard to continuously reduce them.

 

Processes/Systems

 

Everything that a company does is a process. From the way it hires to the way it fires, from entering orders to collecting receivables, from manufacturing products or delivering services to the way you ensure their quality, everything that an organization does can be reduced to a series of definable steps. Processes that are linked together become a system. Lowest cost producers design their processes and resulting systems to be highly efficient.

 

Organizational processes and systems can be classified into four basic categories:

• Sales processes – positioning your company and products, generating leads, converting those leads into orders, and entering those orders into your operations
• Operational processes – engineering and manufacturing your products, and ensuring the quality of your products/services
• Distribution processes – getting your products or services to your customers
• Support processes – human resource activities, management information systems, financial management, administration activities (to name a few). Support processes are essential for your sales, operational, and distribution processes.

As a company grows, these processes and systems tend to evolve with it. Lowest cost companies recognize that evolution does not always yield efficiency, and they constantly evaluate and re-engineer their processes to ensure they are performed in the lowest cost way possible.

 

Facilities

 

After people and materials, the most significant cost center for companies is often their facilities. Facilities include physical plant (offices and factories), equipment and technology hardware.

 

Lowest cost organizations work hard to ensure their offices and/or manufacturing facilities are designed to produce the most cost-efficient performance. They invest in the most effective capital equipment to do the essential work of their business. Increasingly, lowest cost companies look for ways to use technology to increase their productivity and reduce their costs.

 

Capital

 

The last (but not least) source of cost advantage is capital. Capital falls into two fundamental categories, money that you have (cash on hand and equity) and money that you don’t have (receivables and credit availability). Lowest cost companies recognize and maximize the advantages that come from effective capital management.

 

What does this mean for your business? All of these sources are just the first piece of the puzzle. The rest is actually performing them. Once all of these pieces come together, the picture it paints will be one that customers can’t look away from. But how does one figure out if all of the pieces are working together? It’s easy; conduct an employee perception survey. This survey is designed to allow you to get into the minds of your employees. It helps you recognize areas that are and are not working. Most importantly, it instills the fact that you care about your employees and the success of both them and the business.

 

If you’re wondering if an employee perception survey is right for you, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com, and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).Today, sit back and allow us to do all the work, and help you figure out the perfect picture for your company. No one can guarantee certainty, but market research can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More. 

What can you gain from a Customer Perception Survey?

With the first day of fall comes the inevitable change of the world around us. The leaves begin to transform colors, the weather is up in the air (never knowing if it should be hot or cold for the day), and night comes faster than usual, but with every change comes a new beginning. This holds true with businesses as well.

As society changes, businesses must adapt to the differences, especially when dealing with transactions from customers. Understanding your customers is an important aspect to every successful business, and your ability to identify what makes them tick or what they need is always a number one priority. But how do you uncover these little tidbits of information? It’s easy; conduct a Customer Perception Survey. This type of survey allows businesses to measure customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, effective communication, and overall business trends.

Customer loyalty
When a person hears loyalty, they automatically think of being faithful, never straying. This also holds true in the business world. Businesses have to understand the magic behind the inner workings of their customers, since they are one of their biggest assets. This understanding consistently impacts the success of your business. A customer perception survey helps pin-point what customers like and what they don’t like about a business.

Customer satisfaction
A truly satisfied customer is one who doesn’t have any outstanding negative issues with a business, and one who will refer that business to others. In order to reach this magnitude, listening and following through are essential to maintaining the utmost satisfaction. Give customers a chance to voice their opinions about issues regarding a business, and then fix them.

Effective communication
An essential component to dealing with others is effective communication. When done properly, it gives a business the information needed to know what is and what isn’t working at that given moment. It also offers an opportunity for the business to let their customers know about any important changes or innovations in the company.

Spotting trends
Being able to spot a trend before a competitor is critical and could provide a significant advantage. Research can help with this. Although understanding customer satisfaction and loyalty are major drivers, capturing the wisdom of customers offers a business the upper hand in their given industry.

Along with these four areas, customer research allows businesses to critically evaluate their product development, determine product/service features, and determine acceptable price points. It also allows customers to voice their opinions about different strengths and weaknesses (their needs, wants, and expectations) and specific areas for improvement the organization should consider. It gives a business the chance to get into the minds of customers and evaluate what is important when adapting to the changes in society. But most important, customer research can increase sales! Utilizing the results of a customer survey can be incorporated into a business plan, and strategies can be developed to bring a business to their highest working capacity and potential.

If you’re wondering if a customer perception survey is right for you, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).Like with fall, winter is around the corner, but when spring arrives, new growth begins. Now is the time to notice the changes within your industry and within your customer base, and remember that with every change comes a new beginning. No one can guarantee certainty, but market research can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More.