We live in a time when employee loyalty often feels fleeting. In Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplacereport, it’s estimated that “more than half of employees (51%) say they are actively looking for a different job or watching for opportunities.” What would happen if your top producers left for one of your competitors? Do you have a strategy for making sure that doesn’t happen?
Employee turnover is incredibly costly for an organization – due to both the resources expended to hire and train new employees and the resulting loss of expertise and consistency. Companies with high churn rates often experience downward trends in customer satisfaction, as long-term customers are continually partnered with new, less experienced account managers or points of contact.
Therefore, building andretaining a highly productive, highly engaged workforce is increasingly becoming a top priority for business owners, executives, and HR leaders. In the past, creating a winning strategy for achieving that goal often seemed like a moving target, but today, advances in technology are arming decision-makers with dependable metrics for measuring “employee sentiment” and“customer sentiment.”
Anecdotal VS Measured: Which Strategy Are You Using?
How do you know what your employees feel about your organization? How do you judge whether they’re satisfied and planning on growing with the company or dissatisfied and among the 51% who are actively seeking new opportunities?
Traditionally, business leaders relied heavily on reporting from front-line managers. Through one-on-one conversations, supervisors were tasked with judging their subordinates’ job satisfaction levels and identifying needs that weren’t being met. While the anecdotal approach remains quite common, it has proven unreliable for a number of reasons:
There are endless opportunities for miscommunication in these circumstances, especially since decision makers are relying on the manager’s subjective interpretation of the conversation.
Employees may not know what’s missing from their experience with your company, or they may be unable to articulate their needs for any number of reasons.
Those direct supervisors who are conducting the reviews may, in fact, be a contributing factor to the core issues – as there’s a direct link between a front-line manager’s level of engagement and that of his or her direct reports.
The reality is that there are countless ways in which the traditional employee review process may be holding you back. Here are just a few examples:
An under-performing salesperson with great potential believes she simply isn’t cut out for the job, when, in reality, simple sales training could transform her into your most valuable asset.
One of your best employees has put in his two-week’s notice. Just last month, he had an employee review where he said he was satisfied with his job, but now you’re learning that he felt uncomfortable reporting anything negative because he thought it would impact his job security.
Your customer sentiment report shows that many of your most valuable clients are flagged as ‘at risk.’ Engagement among the team is at an all-time low, and the team’s supervisor doesn’t know why. Has anyone stopped to question whether that manager is the real issue?
Measuring employee sentiment is very complex because your employees’ perception of your company and their role in it is dependent on a wide range of variables. If you’re still using traditional methods, you’re missing out on the much bigger picture.
New Tools & Powerful Insights: Are You Ready for a More Productive Workforce?
Employee Success Management(ESM™) is a modern methodology developed by Stonegate that increases employee retention, job satisfaction, and engagement by quantifying three essential components:
What is most important to each of your employees?
How well are you delivering on each of their needs?
Are you falling short when it comes to delivering against your employees’ high-priority values?
Inspired by today’s most innovative customer sentiment tools, employee success management employs the strategies that have helped countless companies improve customer service and account retention – but in an exciting new way. Using cutting-edge assessment tools such as the STAMP Customer Success Management Platform by Stonegate, decision makers bypass the unreliable measures of old and replace them with objective, comprehensive metrics.
“Our customers have been using STAMP to revolutionize the way they predict customer loyalty and maximize customer value, but now, an increasing number are using it to look inward,” says Marc Pierce, founder and CEO of Stonegate. “It’s been exciting to see how HR directors are using the platform to improve employee sentiment and retention, too.”
ESM tools dive deep into questions such as:
What do your employees value most?
How is your company delivering against their highest value needs?
Where is the gap between what you’re offering and what they need?
“Generally, companies used to think that salary was the most important factor for hiring new talent and retaining top performers, but those days are long gone,” says Pierce. “Now, we’ve all come to recognize that other factors play a significant role – including work-life balance, stability and security, company culture, professional development programs, traditional benefits like health insurance, and non-traditional benefits like commuter reimbursements. STAMP helps companies prioritize all those options based on what employees really want.”
The Range of Opportunities: What Can ESM Do?
ESM tools not only guide employees through the process of uncovering what they value most, but it also creates a roadmap that decision-makers can use to implement change as needed. It provides data on large-scale trends inside your organization and on individual employee needs, which empowers executives to adjust company-wide policies and supervisors to customize their management style for each of their team members. The opportunities are endless.
After using STAMP to help build a high-performance team for a specific project, the CEO of a large technology firm shared this story:
“We won a contract for an incredibly complex project that needed to unfold on a very tight timeline, and we knew it was essential to have the most efficient team possible. We’d been using STAMP to measure customer sentiment with great success and wondered if it could help with this new challenge. STAMP not only helped us assemble a team of highly engaged employees, but it also let us check in on how each team member was doing as the project continued to unfold.
Several weeks into the project, we noticed a downward trend in sentiment with this team in particular. In real-time, we were able to identify that several key members felt they lacked some critical skills needed to achieve the project’s goals successfully, and it was impacting everyone involved. We implemented targeted trainings, kept the team moving forward, and delivered a high-quality product, on-time and on-budget.”
Here are just some of the ways ESM programs can impact your organization’s management and HR strategies:
Identify gaps in current hiring, training, and management processes.
Create targeted training and professional development plans.
Help employees better integrate their talents, skills, and knowledge into their current and/or future roles.
Develop more valuable benefits packages.
Structure objective compensation packages, including performance-based bonuses.
Establish effective initiatives to retain top performers.
The goal of every successful company is to find the perfect balance between happy customers and happy employees. With STAMP, you can do both.
About Stonegate:
Founded in 2005, Stonegate provides licensed software products, data solutions, and market intelligence to help its clients better acquire and retain their customers, fueling top line growth. For more information on STAMP, visit http://www.stampcsm.com.
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