Universal Care: Employee Care is Customer Care
Hello and welcome back to another edition of Salty Social Media Vocabulary, where we discuss all things related to social media and CX. We’ve been covering a lot of CX lately, and today we’re going to discuss how employee care is an extension of CX. Happier employees are generally more productive, less likely to leave your company—and ultimately—will take better care of your customers and thus improve your business.
Listen to Your Employees
Company culture is a common trend amongst modern companies—especially tech companies. While free lunch and ping pong tables may improve morale, ask your employees about their needs rather than giving them what you perceive as fulfilling to their needs. Do they want remote flexibility? More vacation days? Changes to company communication? Don’t wait for negative reviews to pop up on Glassdoor and Indeed: ask your employees to guide improvements to your company culture. After all it is their culture.
Encourage Open Communication
As we’ve noted in previous CX posts, your business will benefit from creating open channels for communication. Employees who feel heard are innately happier, so make open communication a priority.
Clearly Communicate Expectations and Needs
A directionless employee is an unhappy employee, and as an employer you can easily improve employee morale by clearly communicating what you expect from them. The easiest way? Develop standard processes for common tasks (think of our Customer Journey Map, but adapted to employee management). Here’s a few to consider mapping:
- New employee onboarding and training
- Communication protocols, including software and chains of communication
- Employee exit/termination
- Customer service, including escalation processes
- Pitching to new clients
There are definitely more; consider this a starting point.
Give Employees Room to Grow and Be Creative
When we talk about employee guidance don’t mean over manage your employees—which is another way to foster unhappiness within the ranks. Process mapping is meant to streamline common tasks, not to restrict employee creativity. Once you have clearly communicated expectations, let your employees do what you (hopefully) hired them to do: use their talents to improve your business.
What strategies do you use to keep employees happy? Have you have any successes or failures with the above strategies? Let us know in the comments. We’ll see you again next week.