In many organisations, employee and customer engagement are still viewed as separate entities. Yet frontline employees’ levels of engagement, coupled with their levels of emotional intelligence (EI), directly determines the quality of customer service that they deliver.
Our 2016 Heartonomics™ series report, ‘Accessing the Triple Bottom Line with Emotional Intelligence’, illustrates the intrinsic link between employee and customer engagement, and enhanced productivity and business growth. The report also demonstrates that higher customer advocacy is directly influenced by the EI skills of employees and leaders.
In our fast-paced business world, the new competitive edge is emotional and grounded in the science of EI.
CEOs and leaders, leverage the benefits of the triple bottom line by aligning your HR strategy with your customer strategy. The one thing that competitors cannot copy is your organisational culture. To carve out competitive advantage in an environment of disruption, it’s crucial to build a culture of engagement from the very top of the organisation all the way to the front line, placing the customer at the centre of employee recruitment and development decisions, as well as leadership scorecards.
The triple bottom line is powered by highly engaged employees with high EI. Employees with EI skills perform better and drive higher customer advocacy on the frontline, leading to enhanced customer loyalty. At the same time, leaders with high EI encourage employees to get engaged at work, building more collaborative and productive teams.
3 tips for aligning HR strategy with customer strategy
Recruiting for and developing EI at all levels of the organisation is an ideal way to align HR strategy with customer strategy. Here are my tips for placing customer strategy at the heart of HR strategy:
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Build a culture of engagement from the inside out
To ensure that your HR strategy has a customer focus, first aim to build a culture of engagement from the inside out. From the very top of the organisation to the frontline, culture is the key to excelling in today’s customer-centric business world.
Think of a culture of engagement like a holistic ecosystem: a network of relationships among people and their environment, interacting as a coherent whole. This whole comprises highly engaged employees who have the EI skills to collaborate well with others and make decisions centred on the customer. Has the organisation given frontline employees permission to show up for the customer? The organisational environment relates to the policies, procedures and systems the organisation puts in place to foster team engagement.
At every level of the organisation, EI skills are required to create a strong culture of engagement and enhance business growth. By recruiting for and developing EI among your people, you can tap into the triple bottom line, ensuring that employees and leaders put in discretionary effort and engage meaningfully with customers and each other.
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Refocus leaders on their role as people engagers
In any business, engaged employees are the most powerful tool for enhancing customer engagement – and it all starts by refocusing leaders on their role as people engagers. Often leaders have been promoted on the basis of their technical knowledge or their tenure with the organisation. Smart companies are now hiring and identifying leadership talent based on their soft skills: their EI.
Engagement relates to the level of emotional commitment employees have to their organisation. It determines their level of effort and productivity. Engagement is strongly tied to the immediate manager – how well they connect the employee to purpose and demonstrate how their contribution matters. Leaders’ level of EI directly impacts the level of engagement and performance of their teams.
Leaders are the custodians of culture, both as role models for EI competencies, and as overseers who reward EI skills in others. Leaders with high EI have higher performing teams. They have teams of highly engaged people who work together as part of a holistic whole.
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Prioritise emotional fitness among your people
To align HR strategy with customer strategy, it’s crucial to unpack how emotions drive behaviour at every level of the organisation. A culture of engagement puts people first – how they feel and the feelings, values and beliefs that drive their behaviour in the workplace and, in turn, customer behaviour.
The way people feel about their work has a direct impact upon the quality of the work they do. It affects their level of engagement and their capacity to form strong relationships with customers and colleagues. Similarly, the way customers feel about your brand will determine if they stay or stray.
Employees’ ability to identify, understand and manage emotions in themselves and others is EI – a highly valuable skillset that can be learned and recruited for from the get-go. To shift the engagement capability of your organisation, start with recruiting and developing the EI of your people on the frontline and among managers.
