With 2010 now behind us an interesting survey recently carried out by Maris Interiors found that over the 2010 Christmas period, over half the offices in Britain (55 percent) spent absolutely nothing on Christmas decorations.

The overall average spend per employee was 23p!!. Only two per cent of the 140 offices surveyed had spent more than £5 per employee on Christmas decorations this year.

Of the 45 per cent of offices with any festive cheer at all, tinsel was the most common decoration: most commonly taped to the ceiling or around computer monitors. And only 12 per cent of companies splashed out on a Christmas tree, with the average height of the tree being less than five feet.

Let’s hope 2011 is a prosperous one and that the economy allows more companies to be less ‘Scrooge-like’; especially as your workforce are your greatest assets – Employee Satisfaction

Your employees are one of your company’s greatest assets. What they say about your company, how they act in the workplace, and how happy they are in their roles all impact on your brand, your image, your levels of service and ultimately your customers’ satisfaction. B2B Marketing recently published an article entitled BRANDING: Motivating employees to be your ‘brand carriers’. The article, which is shown below, makes interesting reading.

Many B2B companies have gone through mergers and takeovers, with the associated churn in staff, sense of insecurity, loss of implicit knowledge and know-how… So, more than ever, B2B companies need to re-address the way they interact with their employees. Positive interaction, fostering brand engagement, can have a massively beneficial impact on your company – and your bottom line.

1. Boost the role of employees in brand communications
   B2B companies’ employees are one of their most powerful assets and need to be recognised as such in any brand communications programme. Including an ‘employee engagement programme’ as a part of your brand plan is a good start. The role of the employee in branding the company is critical – whether it be sales, customer services, or technical support, all have direct customer interface. In effect, they are the brand.
2. Understand the networks that employees use
   Customers and suppliers form relatively small, interlinked professional worlds. Many of them know each other, often from previous employment positions. Markets talk, so it’s time to start listening to what your employees are saying about the company – document both the good and the not so good.
3. Get top management buy-in
   Bottom-up employee engagement initiatives only work if they are joined up with company strategy and senior management. Before spending masses on large-scale employee engagement surveys, give management a ‘weather check’ on the mood of the company, and pinpoint areas that need addressing.
4. Avoid stale jargon – be honest
   Whatever communication tools are used to engage employees – surveys, newsletters, web-casts, intranets, away-days with specialist consultants – it’s crucial that senior management avoid soundbites that sound like lipservice.
5. Address disconnects between company behaviour and communication
   Successfully communicating in today’s Web 2.0 world means addressing inherent distrust and cynicism. Honesty and transparency are important: how a company behaves rather than what it says sends out the strongest signal. If your company really is driven first and foremost by shareholder value, then admit that.
6. Reward honesty in feedback
   Many corporations tend not to interpret negative feedback in the right way, taking it as a way to sideline people who dare speak their minds. This needs to be addressed, otherwise potentially timid employees will be too frightened to voice their opinions.
7. Use social media for employee engagement
   Companies need to go beyond traditional one-way communication vehicles and embrace the world of modern, democratic and conversational-driven media. The industry networks that exist offline – industry events, forums, trade-fairs – are being complemented by these increasingly popular social media channels.
8. Consider hiring employee engagement professionals
   Corporations can get involved with their employees by hiring community engagement professionals, whose job it is to listen and engage within industry forums, read blogs, pick up where the company image is, and re-engage with individuals directly or with influential members of the group in question, to identify problem areas, address them and ensure that change wishes are followed up.
9. Define the experience you wish the customer to have
   In a world where product differentiation is increasingly difficult to achieve and maintain, aspects of service and experience branding – employee branding in this instance – are becoming ever more critical in making a difference. When the technical director or buyer of a client company is asked on a forum, or at an industry trade fair, by a previous colleague or acquaintance, “What are those people at Corporate X like to do business with?” you want them to give a positive picture.
10. Boost word-of-mouth
    What employees say about their company to friends is likely to carry huge weight – more weight indeed than an ad in a traditional B2B industry magazine or a new corporate brochure. If employee views are valued, companies can genuinely create enthusiasm that will spread through the organisation, impacting positively on a range of areas leading to enhanced customer satisfaction.

So maybe it’s time to switch the focus from the voice of the shareholder or the customer to the voice of the employee – the employee as brand ambassador.

• Find out how easy and cost effective it can be to monitor your staff satisfaction levels – click here.
• Read our white paper on employee satisfaction, Understanding and Developing your (People) Assets

Employee satisfaction, just like customer satisfaction, is a variable concept: What pleases one customer or employee is likely to be completely different from what drives contentment in another. In other words, employees can just as well be segmented as customers.

And just like a customer satisfaction segmentation, identifying what motivates employees can be approached from different directions, whether in terms of demographics or needs.

One particular way in which workers can crudely be divided is by nationality. It has commonly been observed that international workforces differ greatly in what they look for in a job.

A caution against this type of profiling is the danger of stereotyping. This is especially so in the case of China, where the received wisdom has been that Chinese employees are solely motivated by money.

However, as the following study, reported in the Wall Street Journal suggests, this perception may well be an outmoded one:

Misunderstanding the Chinese Worker: Western impressions are dated – and probably wrong
By KATHRYN KING-METTERS and RICHARD METTERS

Ask multinational firms to describe what motivates Chinese workers, and the responses are remarkably consistent: Money is the only thing that matters.

"Chinese have zero loyalty to their employer," one executive at a manufacturing firm told us. Said the general manager of a Shanghai hotel: "The most important motivator is money."

But those perceptions may be outdated and wrong.

That’s the picture that emerged when we interviewed, observed and surveyed employees at three Western-branded hotels in China last year and this year. Many of the workers we studied wanted more than just a paycheck from employers, took pride in being part of a team and often were willing to go beyond minimum requirements to solve problems on the job.

While some of the West’s impressions of Chinese workers may have been accurate when U.S. multinationals first started doing business in China in the early 1980s, our findings indicate that what Chinese workers want from a job and what they are willing to put into it has changed since then.

And if what we discovered in the hospitality industry runs true across other industries in China, then multinational companies may be using the wrong incentives to attract and retain Chinese workers. By focusing solely on salary as a motivational tool, they are giving short shrift to things such as training, time off and community building — incentives that could go a long way in a highly competitive job market.

For more click here

Following on from the first three parts last week, today’s blog post finishes our study of the ins-and-outs of employee satisfaction. This concluding part of Carol-Ann Morgan’s paper on Understanding and Developing Your (People) Assets emphasises the importance of benchmarking in employee satisfaction research.

Benchmarking Satisfaction Scores

Benchmarking of employee satisfaction can be carried out in two ways:

1. Internal benchmarking: where scores from within the company are compared using the same questions over a period of time (repeat surveying)
2. External benchmarking: where scores from other external organisations are taken and compared.

In recent years there has been something of a proliferation of “Best Employer” league tables that companies and organisations can subscribe to. Through the use of a standard questionnaire for employees, they serve as a benchmark against which companies can measure themselves. Some of these surveys are industry specific eg Computer Weekly Best Places to Work Survey, whereas others cut across sectors eg The Sunday Times Best 100 Employers and the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers Survey.

External benchmarking, however, has problems of comparability when taken out of the context of the original survey. It can be very tempting to “cherry pick” questions from several sources where the data from other companies is publicly available, however, questionnaires tend to work in their entirety, and the total composition of the questionnaire therefore has an impact on the results obtained.

The comparability of the measurement scales, the method of delivery and the timing of the data collection also impact on the degree to which comparison can be determined accurately. Finally, it raises questions as to who we should compare ourselves to and which companies should be aspired to in performance. It appears reasonable that any company or organisation should always be striving to achieve the best possible results and therefore place efforts to develop internal benchmarks against which to measure the impact of interventions.

Building an Engaged Workforce

What can be seen from the models relating to the staff work experience is that satisfaction and engagement at work is made up of several factors, some being fundamental or contractual requirements for the organisation (the ‘hygiene’ factors), such as pay and benefits and health and safety, other being the areas where the organisation must ‘go the extra mile’ to ensure effective communication, management and cooperation of and with its employees. When an organisation moves to achieving these, the impact will be seen not only in the attitudes and behaviours of its staff but also in the satisfaction of its customers. In an increasingly competitive world, the ability to find and keep good people will often be the deciding factor between organisational success and failure.

The First Direct Bank and NAGE call centres embarked on a programme to measure and address staff engagement issues. Actions included mentoring, job swap, job shadowing (at all levels in the organisation) and the creation of effective and meaningful feedback opportunities. Both organisations saw positive effects in more than staff retention rates. Bolchover (author “The Living Dead”) regards an employee’s relationship with their immediate manager as the single biggest influence on engagement, and believes that middle managers often lack leadership skills to motivate their staff and make work meaningful. He advocates the development of leadership skills to transform engagement with the organisation.

What is clear from the literature is that current thinking extends beyond job satisfaction. Employers are seeking a workforce which is more than just good at the job they do; they are seeking employees who are engaged with their organisation/company, staff who “buy in” to the company mission and goals. It is also clear that no single factor is responsible for the satisfaction of the workforce and different staff members will be motivated by different aspects of the company offering, and their own approaches to work. The modern organisation sees its’ people as key assets to be developed and nurtured; they way in which they approach their work and their interactions with customers is critical to demonstrating the brand values of the company. Emergent models of engagement offer an alternative way of approaching employee satisfaction which is more holistic and takes into account the wider needs of both employees and employers.

Ronan Miles, CEO Oracle UK

Employee research is the starting point in understanding the needs and perceptions of the workforce. The findings can be used to develop the strategy for building a committed workforce who will contribute to the well-being and future security and success of the organisation and avoid Bolchover’s “Living Dead” in the workplace.