What about to see your Employees as customers ?

 

Currently the companies (the ones still active and competitive) understand that is too much more expensive to attract new clients than retain the current ones, so it is now a common idea companies needs to care about their clients, listen to them and exceed their expectations, there is nothing new about that, but this week while listening a presentation from On24 about on-boarding new employees, and I felt like I was on CRM presentation, when I heard about retaining, attract and listen an employee rather then a client.

I have been talking about this since i started this blog, and I strong believe that people are the most important company's asset and hence needs to be seeing as such, but during the call this approach of using the same CRM techniques for employees sounded as a new and interesting approach to adopt.

This open a lot of discussion and has topics for a whole book, but in few words the idea is to see the employees as if they were customers, investing on marketing to attract the desired talent, analyze the resources onboard ans check their profitability,  give voice to the employee by measure its satisfaction and understand their expectations, establishing a good communication channel with them and so on.

Engaged employees do a lot more than disengaged ones, and are more profitable to the company providing better services to the clients, so nothing better than attach their salaries to a serious performance evaluation, involving SMART objectives and feedback.

This requires leaders to be prepared to meet the employees expectations, according to a research (in portuguese) from Catho, 90% of resignations are not related to salaries or benefits, but related to the relationship with their bosses, and seeing employees leaving the company can represent a huge loss, companies lose knowledge, lose talent and strengthen the competitors

This is not trivial, it does require deep changes on the way HRs evaluate and contract new candidates and on how they support leadership to retain them, this is a dramatic cultural change and as such will not be adopted easily and right away for everyone, but there are already some movements towards this way, specially on markets when talented resources are scarce and companies are being forced to make many changes to keep competitive, In Brasil, for example, 2 years ago there was a very innovative marketing campaign for hiring new talent (again in Portuguese, but pretty good and attractive TV advertising video1, video2, video3) from Itau bank, which caused large impact over talented people around country.

I really wish and hope many more going on and we can find more and more people engaged and passionate about their jobs, so in 10 years, looking back at this post I can have the same feeling of "old stuff" I have today when talking about CRM topics, but  till than try  to determine how well your company is doing on this matter, try answer some of the questions bellow and start asking yourself how can you make this happen.

1) When was the last time you got recognize by an outstanding job ?

2) When was the last feedback you got from your boss ?

3) How often do you receive a questionnaire about my expectations and to provide an opinion  about company's work environment?

4) Do you clearly see your boss helping you to growth ?

5) How easily you can find the corporate objectives and goals for the following years ?

6) How many people you hear complaining about the company around you ?

- Cleber Lima
Open your mind, let the future get in