Employee Engagement: Lessons from Customer Service

Many companies are struggling to build or sustain employee engagement. Many are either plateauing or taking one step forward to end up taking one step back. 

On top of this, unemployment is at an all time low (Canada source; US source) and job vacancies are at an all-time high (Canada source; US source), year-over-year.  This means we see companies fighting to get the best talent. So even though the research says, higher engagement equals lower turnover,  we still see high turnover regardless of engagement levels. 

Employees are so vital to our bottom line. Increased efforts and efficiencies can help increase profit by reducing expenses. This got me thinking, if employees impact our profit so much, why don't we put similar efforts into employees as we do when we chase revenues? In other words, why don't we chase employees the same way we chase customers? 

One way we can change our mindset is by using metrics from customer service--particularly, Net Promoter Scores. Instead of taking an overall average of percentage of customers that like your company, Net Promoter Scores subtract any detractors from your promoters. ​

So what would this look like? Let's say a manager has 6 employees, 4 of those people are engaged (or a promoter) at a 9/10 and 2 of those people are disengaged (or detractors) at a 5/10. Using a traditional method, the manager would have an overall score of 77% engagement, pretty good! Using an NPS score, the manager would have an overall score of 34%. This tells a completely different story, and potentially a more important story. 

Seeing a 34%, I would want to delve into these results. Let's continue down the customer service path and examine what this score means in comparison to 'market segments'. For example, what happens if we find males are the 4 engaged and women are the 2 disengaged? Or perhaps baby boomers are engaged but the 2 millennials are disengaged? In the traditional approach, we may have not even intervened. Now we have a completely different intervention around diversity & inclusion or discrimination. 

Implementation

Before you jump into converting your engagement calculations over, test this out with some of your people leader's engagement scores. Does it give you any surprises? Or does it tell you the story you already knew but didn't have evidence for? Use this to build your business case. 

Next, determine how you may action this change? And how many resources do you have to do it? If we are still considering employees like customers, how big is your 'internal engagement team' compared to your sales team?  Effective implementation will involve a large team and/or user-friendly software for administration and analytics. Additionally, either your people leaders or Human Resources Business Partners need to have the skills and knowledge to be able to access, analyze, and take action based on these results. How mature is your organization to do this? 

Additional Lessons from Customer Service

In addition to an engagement NPS, there are other potential metrics from customer service that may be important to consider using. For example, we set sales targets, but are you setting engagement targets for your people leaders? What other other metrics we could use? How about: 

• Response times to employees (i.e., to measure recognition, performance management) 
• Open cases (how many unanswered emails or inquiries)
• Revenue per sale (profit per employee)
• Conversion rates (disengaged or neutrals to engaged employees)
• Customer acquisition cost (recruitment costs)

What other metrics can you think of?