A public insight
TripAdvisor and Yelp have such a breadth and reach now that most companies in all sectors can be subject to review on them. There is only one thing that customers write reviews about and that is their experience of a brand. There is no product or service that can overcome a bad customer experience and that experience will always be created by the people they come into contact with. This is another great reason why employee engagement is paramount to achieving the company reputation you want and need.
Customers will be driven to express their views on TripAdvisor when the experience differs positively or negatively from what they expected, so what a fabulous opportunity to get talked about by doing something different and unexpected. In order to do this however, your people need to feel trusted and empowered, and then recognised for what they have created to ensure best chances of it happening again and again. Such a seemingly straight-forward and simple way to stand out, but not something that is that common in businesses to the degree that is intended.
Peter Merrett, head of customer experience at JLL Australia told me that; “Our values are simple – making peoples’ lives at work as easy and enjoyable as possible is key for us. Trusting and empowering people is so easy to do so why don’t all employers do this?”
Think wider
To consider that it’s only your client-facing people who need to be trained or invested in to create a level of employee engagement that in turn will create a positive corporate reputation, is an easy trap to fall in to. What about your support staff, accounts payable and procurement departments for example? On numerous occasions, a corporate brand has been tainted for me when I’ve had to deal with some so-called back-office departments. A noticeable difference in behaviours and communication standards has many a time given me a very negative view of that company, sadly severely diluting all the good brand reputation work that the traditional client-facing staff have created.
So now we have established the close connection between employee engagement and your corporate brand reputation, we should move onto how you can deal with the potential danger areas and ensure that your brand is supported and reinforced by engaged employees.
We need to be mindful that great employee engagement can also serve to support and improve your employer brand, which of course in the end has an impact on your corporate brand reputation.
Ultimately people behaviour is the most powerful element of your company reputation and without focus on this and processes in place to enhance and monitor it you are leaving a great deal of expensive corporate brand investment to chance.
Often a lack of employee engagement leads to apathy and this creates an overall lack of pride, of feeling valued and respected, and loyalty for the company and the brand, leading to a culture that spills out to the outside world. This external perception of culture feeds directly into your employer brand and not only affects the talent you want to retain but the talent you attract too.
How do we address the gap?
So what are some of the ways in which we can start to improve employee engagement that directly impact your company reputation? Employee engagement surveys are rarely enough to effect the necessary change – firstly they tend to be done once per year so a regular pulse is not kept, and secondly the results are rarely acted upon in a way that creates the required behaviour changes.