Employee Engagement: An Experiential Business Application

Employee engagement and experiential social media shares my insights into one of the biggest challenges faced by business today—the employee engagement crisis, and how firms can change the game. Fewer than a quarter of employees are engaged, a slightly smaller quarter are “actively disengaged,” and the majority is blasé and punches the clock.

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The Crisis

The employee engagement crisis refers to the fact that very few employees are passionate toward and committed to their jobs, as reported by Gallup. This costs businesses huge sums in terms of lost productivity, innovation and sales. This crisis has spawned a multimillion dollar industry of employee engagement consultants and experts. However, few employee engagement programs reach their potential because they’re business-focused, not human-focused.

Five Steps to Transforming Employee Engagement

We can use experiential social media to shift the focus of employee engagement initiatives towards people, which gets much better business results. Here’s how it works.

Step1: We start by adopting an attitude of humility because this enables us to develop more empathy for employees. We recognize that they don’t like our company as much as our owners do. Just imagine how breakthrough this is!

We no longer have to pretend that they should love us. We can drop that arrogance. Instead, we lead with empathy and allow them to love us, based on our actions.

Step2: Then we use ethnographic research of social media to study the careers of people we’d love to work for us. We study their entire careers, so we can understand the whole picture. Then we can design roles that empower them in their career journeys while working for us.

Step3: Using experiential social media, we interact with people in digital public to empower their journeys. We don’t have to promote ourselves because empowering people who correlate to our best employees is the best way to attract them to us. Our recruiters build strong reputations in digital public. And when prospective employees approach us, it’s their initiative. That’s way better.

Step4: We also improve the value of job roles to serve existing employees much better. More than the bullet points in their job descriptions, this is about an attitude change. “Employee” reflects a utilitarian attitude, which is out of touch with reality.

In the current Knowledge Economy, people create value by innovating new things, which requires trust and creativity.

Step5: We mentor managers to acknowledge to their teams that they don’t expect them to be around forever, even though they’d love to have them as long as they want. Even more mind-blowing, we mentor them in continuing to empower our people when they move on. Can you imagine what a message this gives everyone? We care about you, and we want to help you have the best career possible.

Take a minute to think about how your team members would feel when you’ve been doing these things for a while.

I can tell you that when you trust and empower people, they are grateful and happy. And happy, grateful people want to do their best. When you care for people in terms of them, not you, they reward you many times over.

The Impact

So this is a practical way you can transform your employees’ experiences and enjoy amazing innovation and commitment. In the Knowledge Economy, your people are the creative equivalent to manufacturers’ shop floors during the Industrial Economy because they’re your ability to innovate and create value. Also see Customer Experience and Customer Success.

One more thing: employee experience is doubly important because its the foundation of transforming customer experience, customer lifetime value, and all other good things. It’s the first step in activating the Trust Business Chain Reaction.