The longer employees stay with the company, the less likely they will be engaged with what they do. A recent study done by Bain & Company, a global reputation management company, came to this conclusion after surveying 200,000 employees in 60 countries. They determined that the lowest levels of engagement are found among front line staff, employees who have the greatest interaction with your clients.
Maintaining your status as a proactive company is not an easy task. The job entails pre-empting any possible problems and addressing them promptly, so that they will have little or no effect on you or your operational costs. But in order to do that, Digital Marketing experts advise employers to empower their employees with the requisite skills and the knowledge they need to properly identify areas of concern before they become urgent matters.
Should you experience a problem with disengaged staff, firing them may not be the right solution. Typically, there is an underlying cause that needs to be identified before any further steps can be taken. Once you’ve identified the cause, you can then move on to the next step – to invigorate disengaged employees and rebuild their trust. Here’s how you can do that.
1. Emphasize individual accountability
Delegate tasks to individual employees and make sure that each one of them understands the responsibilities involved with the task. It’s also important that h/she understands that the accountability of that task rests solely on his/her shoulders, and not with any other employee.
2. Avoid micro managing
Your employees are humans, not machines. As an employer, it is your responsibility to provide them with the best working environment, if you are steadfast at improving productivity. That means, granting customer service and sales representatives access to client information, automating businesses process that otherwise would take forever to complete, and to accept constructive feedback when the time comes for it.
3. Map out your workplace processes
Determine if you have any redundant or unnecessary processes that are affecting the efficiency in the workplace. Establish a benchmark for different tasks and determine what is or may be affecting the efficiency for those tasks. Your next goal is to eliminate or change inefficient processes.
4. Investing in people and skills
The more skills your staff have, the more innovative they will become. They will also be more capable with new technology as skilled workers are able to work more quickly with fewer mistakes. They generally require less supervision, accept more responsibility, and are better communicators.
Many business executives fail to understand the impact of employee disengagement on reputation management, public relations, and sales initiatives. It has an enormous impact on a company’s revenues. A common question that is asked, “Why are people saying bad things about us on the internet, and what can we do to help?” Most often times it involves employees not being able to follow a protocol or are being disengaged for any of the above mentioned reasons.
At the end of the day, your staff needs to believe in your cause. This will come naturally and you cannot force it upon them on day one. Instead, what you can do is follow the steps we’ve outlined in this blog post and improve workplace activity. As soon as the staff feels that their presence is welcomed and that they are not pressured by case overload, they will be more inclined to stay with your company. You will see how fast your turnover rate decreases.
Resources:
http://www.inc.com/peter-economy/fire-em-up-5-ways-to-inspire-your-employees.html
http://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/4-ways-to-increase-employee-engagement.html
http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/engage-employees-using-customer-service-tactics.aspx
