Why Employee Engagement …?
Came across this nugget in Employee Engagement To What End? – High Performing Companies Keep The End In Sight a report from TNS Employee Insights.
What is the end HPCs are keeping in sight? Their customers, of course.
For High Performing Companies, measuring and action planning around employee engagement, compensation, supervisor relationships, and meaningful work is more than a ‘nice to have,’ more than an academic exercise.
It truly is the engine that drives performance and profitability.
The good news is this: employees who are engaged will likely work harder and be less likely to leave the firm.
The better news: if the powerful engine of employee engagement is directed outward, if the ends are the customer and the future, everyone wins in the end.
On video at Best Buy
You may remember I spoke at MarcusEvans’ big 5th Annual Internal Branding & Employee Engagement Conference in February in Miami. After my talk fellow attendee and SmartBlog writer Robert Jones said he wanted to do a quick follow up interview on the videos I showed to learn about Best Buy’s overall use of moving pictures in employee communications.
We talked, he wrote, and here’s the finished product: How videos sell values at Best Buy.
I’m not our resident video expert – far, far, farrrrr from it, in fact – but we were able to chat about some specific ways Best Buy has successfully used video to reach its employees and create a level of esprit de corps.
Be sure to check out the comments.
Here we go again!
Once again, I’m signed up to talk about Best Buy’s approach to encouraging employees to learn, love and live their brand; this time at the 5th Annual Marcus Evans Internal Branding & Employee Engagement conference in Miami, Fla., Feb. 24 and 25. See you in sunny south Florida!
For those who couldn’t join us …
If you’ve been watching this space in the last few weeks, you know that I was pulling together a presentation for the IABC 2010 Employee Communication Conference Oct. 28-29 in Chicago – a presentation that I reprised at the IABC-Minnesota Fall Conference Nov. 3 in Minneapolis.
My assigned subject was “Employees As Ambassadors for Your Brand,” so I talked about how we approach the challenge of developing brand ambassadors at Best Buy. Brand ambassadors are employees who are passionate about the company for which they work; deliver a second-to-none experience for customers; and take personal responsibility for convincing customers to love the company and/or its product(s) and encouraging them to come back again and again and again.
At Best Buy, we believe employees need four key needs to be met in order to become brand ambassadors:
Reservations are made …
Now I guess I’m committed (and I think maybe I should be!).
Today, I booked flights and a hotel room … Now I have to come up with something to say at the IABC 2010 Employee Communication Conference Oct. 28-29 in Chicago, Ill.
My presentation is entitled (something like) “Employees as ambassadors for your brand.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t pen that title because I lean toward statements or directives in titles (think: “Hug that customer or get out!”), not so much the vague description of potential content.
This here is the description I wrote up for the session:
Read on …
Employee communications heirarchy
A few of us here at the old Best Buy put our heads together a while back and came up with an employee communications heirarchy along the lines of what Abraham Maslow did in his 1943 Theory of Human Motivation. You know Maslow’s Hierarchy, which plots people’s needs on a continuum beginning with food, water and air at the bottom, and moving up through safety, belonging and self-esteem to self-actualization (vitality, creativity and meaningfulness) at the very top. When one need is fulfilled, it no longer motivates and the next need takes its place.
We applied the concept behind Maslow’s work to organizational communications, and what employees need from the companies for which they work. The bulk of our effort was aimed at answering the question, “What do our employees need from us (as a corporate communications function)?” and evaluating our work to see how well (or not) we align – structurally and strategically – to our audiences’ needs and wants. Secondarily, it was instructive to really see that responsibility for the most foundational aspects of our employees’ communication needs fall outside our purview.
Here’s what we came up with:
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