KEY POINTS:
Employee engagement has been a hot topic in corporate circles overseas for the past few years and it is now gathering steam here in New Zealand.
It's about unlocking an organisation to release the talent and human potential that is already there.
Having a dedicated and energised team of employees who understand and believe in the brand can be the difference between a business being a success or a failure. When staff understand what is at the heart of an organisation, it becomes possible to really mobilise them.
Employee engagement is of particular importance in a stagnating market place, with consumers tightening their belts and parity between brands. Sometimes the only real difference is the staff's ability to deliver to customers, especially in the retail and service industries. Customers want the service, product and experience to deliver. With easy access to a host of product information and price comparisons from the internet they are informed and dangerous.
Any organisation, large or small, should consider including employee engagement as part of their communications strategy. It can make a huge difference, not only to staff churn and its financial implications, but it can also help boost a company's overall profits.
Recent global reports show that if all an organisation's employees were "fully engaged", playing at the top of their game and happy about it, their customers would be 70 per cent more loyal, their staff turnover would drop by 70 per cent, and profits would jump 40 per cent.
Sounds great, but how does this happen? I use a variety of communications tools and interventions to assist clients to communicate strategy to staff.
Organisations should view their staff as a bona fide audience group, who should be valued and communicated to as such. But it's not just about the information that is imparted; the way that this is done is just as important. The old modes of corporate communications and the sophisticated multimedia experience that staff are exposed to daily are poles apart - a memo just doesn't cut it in today's world.
Employee engagement has previously been the territory of human resources or internal comms departments, but they only offer one slice of the pie and neither has quite the complete skill set.
Bringing it into a full-service communications agency like DraftFCB means that it becomes part of a holistic approach and has far more impact than when operating in isolation.
As part of a recent employee engagement project to communicate the messages of a new advertising campaign for a high street retailer we brought to life the world of reality television.
We enrolled store managers into a faux reality show called The Store to engineer role playing and get across the essence of the campaign.
This was far more effective than just showing them the ads.
And the proof is in the pudding, the staff left feeling involved and enthused and the retailer saw a 10 per cent rise in sales before the ad campaign broke.
