Building Employee Goodwill and Engagement

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

How does an organization go about building employee Goodwill and Engagement? While there is no one single or simple answer, employee Goodwill and Engagement is built using some of the same techniques used to build customer loyalty. The customer has to be aware of the product, its value, uses, and the product has to provide quality at a fair price. So too must current and future employees be aware of the employment opportunities the organization offers and the value of those opportunities. This does not imply that salary ranges are posted on the Internet, besides; the “value” proposition here is the total rewards the organization is offering.

A common practice in Marketing is to identify and segment an organization’s customer markets based on the products used and the conditions under which those products are applied to the customer’s needs. Then a strategy is developed to inform the customer of the product’s value and its applications. As a component of that strategy, the organization may employ “incentives” to encourage the consumer to initially or continually purchase the product. Once the consumer buys the product and uses it, there is an increased likelihood they will become a steady customer, if the product meets the consumer’s expectations. While working for a large southern bank, I learned that if we could “engage” our customers with three or more of our services, the customers were highly unlikely to move to another bank. At a large health insurance company, we applied that same thinking to employee engagement by enrolling employees in voluntary benefits such as 401(k) and supplemental life and disability coverage.

Employees, like customers value transparency and honesty. Consider when a leading computer chip manufacturer down played a fault in one of its chips, when a SUV maker blamed rollovers on low tire pressure or a software developer ignored customer’s complaints of it operating system. How much "goodwill" was earned with these approaches? Employees want to be heard and want someone to listen to them and their concerns. That does not mean that an organization has to double every employee’s salary, increase the number or holidays or provide free health care. It does mean that organizations should have an active method in place to collect and analyze employee feedback, e. g., satisfaction and exit surveys, open door policies or even lunch with the “boss”. Employees are going to be far more receptive to bad news if goodwill has been developed through a history of openness, trust, transparency, and honesty.

Most individuals spend upwards of eight hours daily employed. Whether that “employment” is piloting a multimillion-dollar aircraft or flipping burgers at the comer fast food outlet; those employees are delivering customer products and services every day. How engaged do you think Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was when he safely landed his US Airways plane in New York's Hudson River? How engaged was that fast food service worker when they got that order wrong? After purchasing four new tires from a national tire company and finding that the lug nuts had not been tightened, I never purchased another product from that company. How engaged was the mechanic who installed the tires, the mechanic’s supervisor or store manager?

Like a warehouse, employee goodwill and engagement must be built and maintained. As with that warehouse, goodwill and engagement are investments that facilitates delivery of the organization’s products. What was the level of goodwill and how engaged was your best salesperson when they left for your major competitor and took one of your top accounts? What are the other members of the sales staff thinking with the loss of one of your top accounts?