On Purpose by Shaun Smith & Andy Milligan

Author:Shaun Smith & Andy Milligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2015-09-18T12:19:51+00:00

Turn your employees into fans

We have found in our own research that there is about an 85 per cent correlation between the way that your employees think about your brand and the way that your customers do. It follows, then, that you need to make your employees your fans too.

Ronan Dunne’s remark raises another interesting point – and that is the alignment between the kind of people your employees and your customers are. It is extremely difficult for employees to relate to customers from a completely different demographic and vice versa. You cannot always mirror these two groups, of course, particularly when you have lower-paid retail staff selling to high-net-worth customers who are probably considerably older. But if you can seek to hire people who relate to both your customers and the product you sell, it can be very powerful. Patagonia is a wonderful example of this. Its employees are passionate advocates of adventure travel who use the brand’s products. These Patagonia ambassadors test the products and write about them in ‘Notes from the field’.

http://www.patagonia.com/eu/enPL/ambassadors

Ann Pickering, the HR director for O2, uses the same concept when hiring people:

‘Take that cadre of people we call “digital natives”. They have grown up with the internet; they have grown up with smartphones; they don’t know what went before, that’s just the way they’ve grown up, and they’re our future. They are our future for O2 too because that’s what our customer base is looking like now.

‘So we brought in these people who have changed our demographics. Our age profile now across the company is around about 40 per cent under 30. The average age used to be about 43. They learn differently, they crowdsource, they use websites and get their information in a very different way. So bringing them in and asking them to challenge the way we do things has really made a big difference, because they just think completely differently.’

Many organizations participate in surveys like ‘Great Place to Work’ and benchmark themselves very seriously against the other brands in the database.

http://www.greatplacetowork.net/home

We are strong advocates of this because we believe that engaged employees make for strong companies. However, having said this, as we have already stated, strong brands have unique cultures and whilst there are many generic attributes that describe a great employee experience – trust, pride, enjoyable work, among others – the mix will vary from brand to brand. Similarly, what employees value can vary from organization to organization depending on their generation, the nature of the industry and the brand. For example, Patagonia employees value the time and opportunity for adventure, Topshop sales advisors value their ability to buy great fashion at a discount, and Apple employees probably enjoy getting hands-on with the latest technology. For this reason, our Employee Experience Survey is built around our ‘Organizational Alignment Model’ (see the On Purpose toolkit). This measures both importance and performance of a number of attributes and compares the employee experience against what they value and what the organization is striving to achieve, allowing the context to inform the findings.

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